Protector
by forever-ioand-ever
Summary: He shot him. Just like that. Jo still can't believe what she saw, and neither can Henry. And the only way the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth can come out is by untangling centuries of lies and deception.
1. Chapter 1

The streets were crowded. Then again, the streets are always crowded during lunch hour in New York. People jostled through the melee, briefcases and purses used as discreet battering rams to push their way through. Detective Jo Martinez happened to be following either a very powerful businessman or a very powerful drug dealer, for he and his elephantine briefcase cleared a manageable path for her to follow.

Unlike those around her, Jo wasn't heading for a meal at one of the many exorbitantly priced fast-food joints of the city. She was on a case, a case that had been especially troublesome for her preferred ME.

See, Henry had a thing for scarves. She didn't know when it'd started, and she didn't know quite why, but the man did not go anywhere without a long, thin piece of fabric around his neck. So of course a nice scarf strangling would make him a little uneasy.

At least, that was what she written his unease off toward. In reality, Henry was afraid-severely afraid. For Jo.

In fact, his anxiety was so imminent that he was currently following her through the city streets. Not closely, she was a detective, after all. _Is_ a detective.

Henry, wearing the ubiquitous maroon scarf, was about five sidewalk squares away from her. When she would look his way, which wasn't all that often, he would look down as if he were texting. She wouldn't think to label that figure as him; he didn't own or believe in cell phones. Usually at this time he was actually feeling the lump in his right coat pocket, memorizing the feel of the object even though he'd been closely studying it for months now. Just in case.

Most of his time was spent surveilling the crowd around her. He would quickly scan the faces, then return his gaze to her, afraid she'd been harmed in the few seconds he'd looked away.

Jo turned a corner, and Henry followed. When he rounded the bend, his blood froze. He had found what he was looking for; something he'd hoped to never see.

With trembling hands, he pulled the Beretta from his pocket and raised it, never lowering his gaze from the target. He tensed his jaw, in fact, he tensed his whole body. He was frozen with fear, though his hand still trembled.

He put his left hand on the other side of the pistol to steady it. Instead, both hands and the firearm shook uncontrollably. He took a breath, hoping for deep and peaceful but ending up shallow, with a swallow of bile.

The shot rang out before Henry realized he'd pulled the trigger.

{*.*.*.*}

_He felt the shots before he heard them. The vibrations from the pistol's blast coursed through the shooter's body and into the floorboards she was standing on, the ceiling over him. He knew he had precious seconds before she would come down and discover him and his immobile hostage. _

_He stood astride over the man, who was trying to suppress his dying moans through gritted teeth. The man was doing a good job of it, he had to admit. Both had the technique as down as possible by now given all the times they'd died._

_The broken body oozed blood from the wound in his back, a glimmering antique dagger sticking up toward the man. He forcefully pulled it out, causing the man below to at last cry out in pain, though again very controlled. He had as much riding on not being discovered as did the mysterious man above, if not more._

_The man abruptly yanked up the dying man's head by the hair and stuck the bloody dagger under his neck. Before he sliced the throat, he whispered "You can thank me later."_

_The killer waited a few seconds, watching the dead body. He knew what would happen, of course. He'd been stalking the man for centuries, he knew they were the same. But something, somewhere in the little, almost silent conscience he'd long hidden away, the idea that the man might actually have died niggled at his mind._

_He was extremely relieved when the man's body vanished before his eyes, along with all the blood on the ground and on his own hands. Before the shooter above could come down and see him standing there, the man known as Adam quickly left the basement of the Frenchman's shop._


	2. Chapter 2

At the sound of the gunshot, the policewoman in Jo sprang into action. Her first instinct was, of course, to help the victim, who was laying on the sidewalk, blood gushing from the gaping wound in his chest. However, her police training told her to scan the crowd for the gunman. Or woman. Plus, who was she kidding, the wounded man wasn't going to live.

Her sense of justice overriding compassion, Jo began meticulously scanning the crowd for a shooter. She started by looking from the exact place the bullet had come from, though the shooter could be long gone. Her keen eyes didn't fail her, and she quickly spotted the small black handgun, slowly being lowered by a male's shaking hands. She followed the trenchcoat-sleeved arms up past a maroon-scarved neck and up to the quivering lips and wide brown eyes of none other than Doctor Henry Morgan.

{*.*.*.*}

_Henry held the letter in his hands, unsure what to think. It had appeared on his desk that morning, no explanation for its presence. Then again, Lucas wasn't exactly the best person to ask for specific details on something that wasn't his daily coffee and doughnut._

_The handwriting on the outside of the envelope was familiar, but he couldn't place it at first. He hoped it was nothing of importance and set it aside to open later. He then shrugged into his lab coat and began the first Y-incision of the day._

_The letter haunted his thoughts all through the morning. He found himself unable to concentrate on the body in front of him and passed off the work to Lucas, to the younger man's delight. Henry then went back into his office, offering a helping hand were Lucas to need one._

_Ah yes, the letter. He could tackle that now. He pulled an antique letter opener from his drawer. Over a century old, it had never known another owner. He spent no time gazing at the way the light reflected off the silver blade and bounced about the room and through the glass front wall of the office par usual, but quickly and precisely sliced open the envelope._

_From inside he pulled a sheet of paper, typed on the ever-obsolete typewriter, folded in thirds so as to fit inside. As he unfolded the aged, crumbled sheet, a few small photographs tumbled out. Henry gathered the black-and-white shots from the floor and almost set them aside before he recognized their subject matter._

_It was her. Her, tied to a chair, a gag around her mouth, her bright blue eyes still shining through the grey tones, wide with panic. Another frame: Her, posing with a family he had never seen, there but not part of them. Her, older, older than when he'd last seen her._

_The letter explained it all. Who, why,, when, how. It filled Henry with such a rage at what had been done to the love of his very long life, him unaware and unable to stop it. He blamed himself for every last bit of he been more perceptive, had he just seen one little thing here or there, maybe it would all be okay. It would be confusing and the outside world wouldn't understand, but it would be their okay._

_And if he could find the person who had done this to her, Henry knew he wouldn't be able to stop from becoming the savage beast this person wanted him to be._

{*.*.*.*}

Jo's mind went completely blank. Her training and experience told her to slap the cuffs on his wrists, but her heart and emotions told her that there had to be a reasonable explanation for Henry doing... Committing...

She couldn't even make herself complete the thought. Unaware of her own action, Jo took a step forward, toward Henry and the gun. Henry slowly put the firearm back in his pocket and simply stood, looking her right in the eyes. hesitantly and carefully, Jo moved forward again. A siren sounded in the distance, and he skittishly looked around himself, as if there hadn't been hundreds of witnesses to the fatal gunshot.

"Henry," Jo commanded, her tone the one she normally used to get him back on track with an investigation. The sort of 'snap out of it' tone. She was surprised to find herself robotically following her training in the situation, keeping the gunman as calm as possible and as controlled as she could.

Her sharp command brought his gaze back to her. She took another step forward, trying to discreetly flash her badge for the onlookers to know she wasn't equally crazy. Then again, this wasnt a normal shooting situation; Henry already knew she was an officer.

As she moved closer, she saw his eyes widening in fear, directed at something just over her left shoulder. Though her curiosity ached to see what was causing it, she kept her focus on Henry. Jo slowly came closer and closer, ready to detain him at the first reappearance of the pistol.

Why she didn't expect was for the hands that had been on the gun to reach out and grab her arm. She flinched at the touch, a flimsy, shaking grasp that grew tighter every second.

"Detective," Henry gasped, still looking behind her, "you have a car nearby, right?"


	3. Chapter 3

Before she could answer him, Henry began running for the car, still holding Jo's arm. He could hear the panicked screams of the crowd behind him, where all logic said a dead body should be lying. Whether or not it was still there was another question entirely.

He was still completely shaken over what he had done. 235 years, and he'd never, ever killed a man. He had, of course, been in a few wars, but never in the front lines. If he was at war, he had been a doctor or surgeon. Never the man with the gun aimed at another human being.

He was ripped from his own frightened thoughts by the sound of metal clinking against metal. He looked over to see Jo shakily unclipping handcuffs from her belt.

"I suggest you don't use those, Detective."

He said it without emotion. Without even looking at her. Jo, now the pliable hostage, acceded to his command. As she put them back, she countered him in an equally emotion-free reply.

"What do you suggest we do, then?"

"My first course of action would be that we go down to the precinct."

He said it slowly, deliberately, yet conversationally, as though this were the end of any normal case and they had to get back and do the paperwork. He rested his hand on the white handle of a passenger door of a car, letting go of Jo in the process. She was stunned to see that it was her own police car.

"Back," she commanded, nodding toward the seat reserved for criminals. Henry raised his brow in a challenge as Jo circled around to the driver's door. Seeing that he hadn't moved and all too familiar with his peculiar stubbornness, she rolled her eyes and conceded for Henry to take his usual place. Shotgun, ironically.

The detective and the doctor got in the car. Jo clicked her seatbelt and looked over to see Henry holding himself confidently, hands on his lap, clearly in her sight. They continued to quiver, revealing his fear and unsteadiness, along with the faraway look in his eyes.

He caught her stare and immediately lifted his hands, just a little, showing that they were empty. "I'm not going to hurt you, Detective."

"You know I have to call this in to the Lieutenant, right Henry?"

She was more concerned than afraid. Henry could see it reflected in her eyes. He nodded, then set his hands back on his lap. Jo pulled out her cell phone, quickly looking over at him as she punched in the Lieutenant's direct number.

"Don't you dare get any ideas."

Henry didn't have any, nor did he plan on getting them. He was too occupied by his emotions to think of escaping. He took a few deep breaths, trying to slow his heart rate and quell the tremors in his hands. He watched as Jo held the phone to her ear, tapping the fingers of her left hand on the doorframe in impatience as she waited for an answer.

"Reece? It's Jo."

She was already tense. But her body language grew more abrasive as she listened to the Lieutenant.

"Of course I've heard about the shooting, the bullet flew over my shoulder for God's sake!"

"Yes, I was there! In fact, I've detained the shooter as much as possible-"

Jo was cut off by Reece again. She adopted an urgent tone as she continued.

"You don't understand, Lieutenant. The shooter was Henry."

{*.*.*.*}

_It was cold. Oh so cold. _

_Adam opened his eyes as a ferocious shiver coursed through his body. He found himself in a large silver-walled room. Milk crates lined the walls and candies and toppings filled the shelves._

_An ice cream stand. Better than the meat locker he'd reappeared in last time. Though this had much less inspiration for him, especially after being murdered._

_Knowing that he needed to leave before he froze to death (though it wouldn't really matter because he would just reawaken in the same place), Adam went around the room searching for a door. And an empty box. As callous as he was about humanity and society in general, he did still find it extremely uncomfortable emerging from random freezers in the way his condition left him there._

_If only he'd known this would happen when he'd decided to go on that voyage._

_He grabbed a box that had been forgotten and wedged in a corner, opened up the bottom, and pulled it around his waist. Holding the box with his right hand, he pushed in the door handle with his back and slowly emerged into the stand._

_He was met by the frightened stares of two teenagers, clad in pristine white smocks and blue baseball caps declaring the name of the eatery he'd wound up in the freezer of. The Meadows. That was a new one. Which meant he didn't have any clothes stashed in a secret nook or cranny as he did at all the other places he'd learned were his usual reappearance locales._

_He bolted for the door. It was difficult to run while holding the box around himself, but he'd had quite a while to practice. One of the boys chased him down while the other went to the phone to call the cops._

_He'd been caught before. He had a rap sheet miles long of public nudity charges. But today, today was not the day to get arrested. What if someone recognized him as the disappearing dead body on 38th and Park? What if Henry identified him?_

_He groaned inwardly as he finally made the realization that Henry had to know who he was now, otherwise he wouldn't have been shot dead by the man. His fury welled up inside him. He had been winning this game, but now Henry had the upper hand. Sure, he might get a little jail time for the shooting, but without a body they couldn't hold him for life. Then again, a short sentence for his fellow immortal would give Adam time to plan his next course of action in getting Henry to finally ally with him._

_He was too occupied by his plans for dominating the immortal to notice the step below him. He tripped and fell, his body splayed out in the back hall of the stand. The boy who had been chasing him now stood over him, much in the same way he had over Henry earlier that year, albeit he wasn't slowly bleeding to death. Only some small scrapes on his arms._

_But he was about to be arrested. Again._

* * *

><p><em>how about that episode last night? I just realized I haven't written any ayenns on this story yet so hello there readers! I hope you're enjoying the story so far... and I promise not to foregt about Halfway Done either, but I keep getting so many good ideas for continuing this. If you haven't figured out, there's always some sort of flashback and there always will be. I decided to have a little fun with this one and give a little insight on Adam's character. Hope you didn't mind.<em>

_disclaimer: I am not ABC Networks and i do not in any way, shape, or form, own the characters, plot, etcetc of Forever. I've just kidnapped them for my own little creative rants._

_other disclaimer: 38th and Park is not a real intersection in NYC. It was a filler that I put in and it just kinda stuck before I checked for veracity. _


	4. Chapter 4

_"_I'm going to have to cuff you now, Henry." Jo sighed as she parked the squad car at the precinct building. She looked over at the man sitting in her passenger seat, her disappointment in his actions shown on her face. He returned the look with a slight pout.

"Now is _not_ the time," she said through gritted teeth. Henry returned his face to a stoic state as Jo got out of the driver's seat and came around to put the chained-together sliver bangles on his He awkwardly crawled out of the car, realizing for the first time just how valuable his arm movement was to him. Once he was out on the sidewalk, Jo reached in the side pocket of his jacket and took the gun. He acquiesced completely to the arrest, letting her properly detain him and lead him quite visibly into his workplace without any sort if fight.

He kept his head down, hoping no one would recognize him. As it settled more in his mind what exactly he had done on the corner of 38th and Park, Henry felt more and more shame and regret. He could tell already this was going to be up there with the day he chose to protect his secret over saving a dying man.

He tried to rationalize it. He did it to protect Jo, to protect Abe. He did it to if not stop, at least detain the maniac that haunted his life. He hadn't even killed the man: if he was who he said he was, he'd be back soon enough.

Nothing, none of these reasons and excuses would change the fact that Henry had wielded the power to take a human life and he had followed through with it. He was a murderer, and nothing could change that.

"I know you know the drill, but I've still got to read you your rights and the legal stuff," Jo said, bringing Henry back to the present. She listed off the usual rights of remaining silent and having an attorney, etcetera etcetera, and wasn't too terribly surprised when Henry declined the attorney and asked for a phone call.

Jo led him over to a silver payphone hanging from the wall. She unlocked the handcuffs, then walked away just enough so that, though the conversation would feel private, she would be listening to every word. From her position across the room she gave Henry a no-nonsense glare.

His hands still trembling, albeit much less than they had been earlier, Henry picked up the phone from the wall hook and punched in the number on the little metal buttons. The phone rang a couple times, and with each ring he grew more nervous and tense. He tried to alleviate the stress by pacing, but the phone's cord only allowed him to take a couple steps in each direction before having to turn around again.

Jo stood off to the side, leaning up against the wall and watching her suspect. Her favorite ME. Her unofficial second partner. Her _friend_. She still didn't quite know what and how to feel. Then again, who would? This man she had trusted, trusted more than she realized, was about to be convicted for murder. By her own hand.

At last the phone picked up, and Henry sighed with as much relief as he could when he heard his son's voice on the other end.

"Abe?"

"Yeah, Henry?"

"I need you down at the police station. Please." He uttered with desperation.

"What was it this time?" Abe sighed. Henry imagined the eye-roll likely to have gone with it. It made him smile. Slightly and only for a moment, but a smile nonetheless. Abe always gave him a hard time when he was actually arrested for his returns. It was nice to know something was still normal in his off-kilter universe.

"I'll go get some clothes," Abe continued.

"No." Henry demanded. He looked over his shoulder at Jo, trying to gauge how closely she was listening and therefore how much he could say. "I don't... I didn't... I just need _you_ here, Abe."

{•*•*•*•}

_They had been ghosts fr some time now. Henry would drift silently in and out of the flat, barely speaking. As for Abe, he barely returned home anymore. Always out with friends, or a date, or just God-knows-where. _

_It had been hard on them. No, that was an understatement. It had been one of the worst things that had ever happened. No reason, no explanation, nothing. The two had been left to drift aimlessly in a cold and unfeeling abyss they didn't know existed._

_Henry needed _someone_ more than anything. Someone to comfort him and tell him everything would be alright again. And the only someone who could do that was his son._

_Abe, on the other hand, didn't want to face the reality of his family. He'd tried anything to vanquish, or at the very least numb, the pain. Education did nothing, fighting did nothing, protests, friends, dates, music, nothing. Nothing could take it away. But he still tried, though he knew nothing would work._

_He lied facedown on his mattress, hands holding up his head as he studied for an art history exam. The phone in the dormitory hall rang yet again, crashing his train of thought. As he was trying to refocus, his RA came and knocked on the open door._

_"Abe, it's for you."_

_Abe nodded and came out to the one phone used by his whole hall. He leaned up against the painted block wall, trying to pose himself in some semblance of coolness._

_"Hello?"_

_Three was no answer. At least, not on the phone. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see his father walking down the hall toward him, hands in his jacket pockets and a maroon scarf around his neck._

_"I got a little impatient, I guess." Henry said when he reached Abe._

_"Da- Henry, what are you doing here?" Abe asked, barely catching himself before he called his father Dad. Were anyone else to see them, they would think hte two were merely friends, possibly brothers were they to embrace as both so desperately longed to do. That was part of what was so hard for Abe now, Henry as well, but at least he'd lived this strange reality before, that moment when father and son began to look like brothers. Abe couldn't even fathom that one day his father would appear to the world as more likely his son._

_"I miss her. I miss us. Everything..." Henry sighed, his brown eyes glistening with the tears he was trying to control. He wanted to say "I miss you" too but he knew the whole world would get the wrong idea._

_Abe reached over and put his arm across his father's shoulders. Henry reciprocated the side hug and pulled Abe close to him, squeezing tightly, clinging to the only thing that motivated him to want to live another day._

_He'd lost Abigail, but he still had Abe._

_Across the road, a man watched the unconventional father and son stroll through the quad of Berkeley. He didn't want this to happen, and he would make sure it wouldn't last. But he'd let them have their moment. _

_And then he'd take it away. Just like he'd taken the first._

_A smile crossed his face as he turned back around and looked at his captive. The forty-something woman looked back at him with desperate, wide cerulean eyes. It was all she could do. _

_He'd let her go. Someday. But for now, she had to suffer as much as her husband._


	5. Chapter 5

The room looked so empty. Four gray-green block walls, a metal table, two chairs. One man, seated erect in the aforementioned chair, right hand on his knee, left lying on the table. A single handcuff was chained to the center of the table, the links wrapped around a bar flush with the table's surface. The cuff was around his left wrist, hence his hand was on the table.

He appeared in a daze, in a trance. His eyes remained fixed straight ahead, barely blinking.

Jo stood on the other side of the two-way mirror, watching Henry. She wasn't really focused on _him_ per say, but couldn't stop thinking about what he'd done. It felt like she'd somehow been betrayed, though Henry had done nothing directly to her.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, tensing a little at the touch. Her mind was barraged with the memories, memories of a time so near yet long-gone. A time as carefree as possible for a homicide detective. Memories that turned from joy to sorrow, to a betrayal with no visible perpetrator.

_Oh God, not now. Not here, not-_

_Damned brain. Don't think about him._

Jo looked from the corner of her eye to see Lieutenant Reece standing next to her, hand on her shoulder, staring straight at Henry.

"You don't have to do this, you know."

"I need to, Joanna."

"You sure about this, Jo?" Hanson asked from the other side of her. "I can take care of it if-"

"I'm fine, Hanson." She snapped. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have a murder suspect to question."

{•*•*•*•}

_"You don't have to do this, you know."_

_Jo barely registered her mother's words, she was too lost in the numbness. She idly walked forward into the room, running her hand across the back of the couch. She was wrenched out of the abyss, if only for a moment, by the texture changing from leather to cotton._

_His jacket, slung over the back of the couch. Like usual. Normal. He could walk in the door anytime and pick it up. She'd berate him for not hanging it up in the first place. He'd laugh, she'd laugh, and the jacket would again be tossed on the couch and forgotten until morning._

_Memories. That was why she hadn't returned. She knew she wouldn't be able to handle it._

_It was terrible, really, a woman who had seen murder scene upon murder scene, things more gruesome than the average human could imagine yet not flinch, being so worked up over seeing inanimate objects. Objects sitting peacefully in rooms. Rooms connected to rooms, on a hall, in a tower in New York._

_That was how she had to take it. Rationalize it. This wasn't their apartment, it was a room. Not the dishes they'd painstakingly chosen from the registry, just some plates and cups. Not the dress he'd gotten her for her birthday, just some fabric with some seams and stitches._

_Jo was unaware she was crying until she saw her silent tears dripping on his jacket, which she was grasping tightly, her knuckles white with the effort._

_This was so unfair. All of it._

_She walked about the apartment, clutching his jacket tightly, restraining herself from unleashing her anger and guilt and frustration by smashing their belongings in some sort of childish tantrum. She forced herself to look at every room, every closet, every drawer in the home._

_Maybe if she saw it all, it would finally sink in._

_He was gone. And life would never be the same._


	6. Chapter 6

She closed the door abruptly behind her, sending a louder-than-usual echo through the interrogation room. The thin Manila folder and small notebook were clutched tightly to her chest with a white-knuckled hand. She looked wrecked, like the morning's events had taken their toll on her, but she'd tried fruitlessly to cover the tiredness with makeup, the frazzling with hairspray, the red in her chocolate eyes with a round of saline eye drops.

Jo slowly walked over to the table, each step paced and deliberate. She set the case file on the metal surface and stood behind the empty chair, clinging to the top of the back rest. Still a white-knuckled, desperately frustrated grip.

Across the table, Henry observed. He analyzed and processed and read the detective's haywire emotions. He could tell immediately that, though his actions had triggered the majority of her controlled pugnacity, there was something else, something more abrasive to her than even her astute coworker shooting someone point-blank in public seemingly without remorse.

He knew he looked for all the world like a psychopath. He'd seen too many in his copious days to not realize that. He'd casually killed, then remained fairly nonchalant through his arrest and now, in questioning, he would probably remain the same way. He had kept his cool last time they brought him in for murder...

"I don't even know where to start," Jo uttered, laughing and scoffing at the same time from the sheer preposterousness of the situation. She looked up at the ceiling as though perhaps answers or just some better questions would rain down on her.

Henry pulled the folder closer to himself. He cracked open the top just a little bit, then looked up to Jo. "If I may?"

"No, you may _not_," Jo replied sharply, whisking the folder from his hands. "Have you ever seen me give details of a case to a suspect before?"

"Well, no," he nodded. "Except for the last time when the suspect was myself."

"That was different, Henry. You were already working on the case when we questioned you."

"And this time?"

He was so calm. So collected. Deja vu of the questioning for the subway conductor's murder. Except of course that time there wasn't a police witness to the crime nor was Henry actually the killer.

"And this time, when the body gets here, you're still going to be under suspicion. Hence you won't be allowed to work for the police. Think about _that_ at all when you pulled a gun today?"

Henry was surprised by Jo's glib question, yet he wasn't fazed at all. He'd learned over the years that one of the easiest and most common ways to deal with unsettling and tragic situations was through sarcasm. It wouldn't solve the problem, but it would mask it. It was a façade.

He could tell that the detective was trying her best to question him as she would any other suspect. And truly, no, no he did not think about job security when he was pulling the trigger. He was too busy thinking about the two most important people in his life and what it would mean for them were he to not act immediately. It was irrational, he knew it was, but had he not taken aim and fired...

"What the _hell_, Henry‽"

Jo paced around the front of the interrogation room, her hands clenched into fists. Henry sat staring at the wall, lost in thought. He'd absorbed himself so in his irrational rationalization that he'd forgotten Jo had even posed a question to him. She stopped in her tracks and slammed her palms on the table in frustration.

"You just _shot_ someone and you have nothing to say for yourself‽"

Henry looked up at Jo, then back down at his hands. Ashamedly, he whispered, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

{*.*.*.*}

"_Ah, c'mon, you're supposed to let me win!"_

_"Not after seventy years I'm not."_

_Abe returned his father's laugh with a puppy-dog stare, which was just as effective in his elder years as his younger._

_"Don't you give me that look, young man!" His father reprimanded, narrowing his eyes and raising his index finger._

_"I can give you whatever look I want. I'm old. Old people can get away with anything."_

_With what he thought would be a winning argument made, Abe rose from the chess table, a hand on his back to slightly alleviate the arthritic ache in his spine. He straightened up and turned to look at his father, who sat cross-legged, carefully examining his glass of wine._

_"Except for death." Henry said, gazing into the Chardonnay._

_"Thanks for the reminder," his son groaned with an eye roll._

_Henry, realizing his mistake, sat his wine back down and turned to Abe. "I meant for me, Abraham. Sorry to..." He looked down at his hands. "I don't like to think about it, either."_

_Abe brushed it off. "No, it's fine, it's fine. It's gonna happen so we might as well-"_

_He was cut off by the ringing of the antique phone on the store counter. He raised his index finger to tell his father that he'd return to the discussion in a moment, then answered the phone._

_"Abe's Antiques, this is Abe."_

_"Hello, Abraham."_

_The voice. The eerie, gravelly voice. It sent chills down his spine just thinking about it, let alone hearing it. Without letting the caller speak further, Abe slammed the headset back onto the receiver. He stared at it for a minute, then looked back up at Henry._

_"Who was tha-"_

_Now it was Henry who was cut off by the phone's persistent ringing. He looked up at Abe, a dubious look across his features. Abe stepped back and flourished his hands toward the phone for Henry to answer this time. This could only mean one thing._

_Henry picked up the headset and was greeted with the condescending, maniacal voice._

_"Good evening, Henry. Quite a night last night, eh?"_

_Henry immediately grew tense at the man's suggestion that he knew his secret. He turned away from Abe and spoke in a hushed, brusque tone into the phone._

_"What do you want from me, Adam?"_

_"Your precious girlfriend could've really gotten hurt."_

_Adam had quite the knack for changing the subject, only making Henry's frustration worse. It took all his self-control to keep silent as the unwanted call continued._

_"Maybe she won't be so lucky next time. Did you get my little confession letter yet?"_

_That letter. The letter on his desk that morning that had made his blood run cold. The letter that Henry had discussed with no one, not even Abe. The letter he'd wanted to burn in the fire and scrub from his mind. But he couldn't bring himself to do it._

_"I thought so. Watch your back, Henry. And hers."_


	7. Chapter 7

"Try me."

Jo slammed her palms on the table, her eyes lit with an angered passion for justice. The movement jostled Henry's handcuffs against themselves andthe table.

He looked into her eyes, his gaze never wavering.

"I did it for you."

Jo was definitely taken aback by that. "What do you mean_ you did it for me_?"

If anyone else had said that, Jo would have immediately suspected some sort of psychopathic affection playing a part. A mental illness or disorder, a distorted mind that would do _anything_ to get a woman's attention. But this was Henry. Calm, cool, collected Henry. Sure, he had his quirks, but nothing that would have ever suggested this sort of thing to her.

If he were as desperate for her attention as to kill someone to impress her, he would be a lot more proud of his actions. He was, in fact, putting on as calm and collected as usual of a front, but that was all it was. A front.

Inside, Henry was panicking. It was only a matter of time before his intended victim was back on his feet and threatening him again. He'd probably be even more violent this time. He might actually risk exposing himself to Henry in order to harm him. Or worse, to harm Abe or Jo.

See, that was the beauty of the frightened equilibrium that had existed before Henry had shot him. His stalker didn't know he had the upper hand. Now that Henry had gone and killed him, there might be a slight rift in that scenario.

"I was merely doing you the service of any gentleman. Protecting the woman he... The woman who is very special to him."

He caught his words at the last second. Was that what he was really feeling for her? That four letter word he had almost uttered? The question ricocheted around the minds of both Henry and Jo, though neither would admit that perhaps there was more than friendship in their relationship.

After she got over the initial surprise, Jo collected herself into the law enforcement professional she was supposed to be. She asked her next question in a gentle, almost motherly, yet nonetheless probing tone.

"And what were you trying to protect me from, Henry?"

She leaned across the table, facing Henry, her left hand supporting her chin and her right extended toward the suspect, palm down. Her short brown hair fell from behind her ear and covered her eye just a bit so that she couldn't see the one-way mirror in the wall of the interrogation room. Not that it mattered, she'd only see a reflection of herself and Henry.

Henry, on the other hand, had had prodigious practice with looking through a one-way mirror. Again, not that he was usually on the wrong side of one, but it was an ability that he'd sharpened as the mirrors grew in prevalence, an ability that had come in handy a few times over the years. One of those times was now.

He stared out at the figure he saw through the mirrored reflection of himself, a resolved, hardened look on his face like Jo hadn't seen ever before.

"Him."

{.*.*.*.}

_It had been an accident, really, the first time Henry laid eyes on his stalker and knew it. Of course, they had met countless times over the years as he now well knew, but prior to this chance encounter, there was only his "mercy" killing in the basement of the Frenchman's store because of the psychopathic Soul Slasher murderer whence the two had consciously met._

_It was about two weeks before the scarf-strangling case, that case Jo had been on her way to continue investigating when the shots were fired._

_At that time, Henry and Jo were fully involved in what should have been a cut-and-dry case, at least from Jo's perspective. The victim had been found in relatively good condition, sans a little rigor Mortis. When the toxicology reports came back confirming Henry's initial diagnosis of acetaminophen poisoning, everything screamed that it was a suicide. Only by Henry's persistence that this young woman had not voluntarily swallowed a lethal dose of Tylenol were they even on the mission that would eventually lead him to his stalker._

_On the afternoon in question, Henry and Jo were investigating the victim's apartment for any clue that would lead to the murderer. Henry was dusting along the mantle of the fireplace with his trusty original FBI fingerprinting kit. Jo, though pretending to act annoyed over it, was still throughly curious as to _why_ he owned an original FBI fingerprinting kit and why he insisted on using it when the modern technology she happened to be dusting the kitchen with was at least a thousand times better than the century-old stuff he was using._

_"It wasn't here." Henry mused, looking up at nowhere in particular. Jo looked up at him from her dusting with a curious look. He probably had no obvious reasoning for his discovery, but she nonetheless trusted him and his killer-finding instincts._

_"Then where was it?" She inquired dubiously._

_Henry did not answer her, he simply left the room and went into the hall, paying no mind to anyone or anything but his mission. Josighed and followed him out, careful to lock the door on her crime scene. Or not, according to the ME._

_She caught up with him on the stair landing a floor up, where he knelt on the ground looking at what seemed to be a nice collection of dust bunnies. He was tweezing up certain particles and putting them in individual baggies. She watched him, curious, but not at all surprised by his behavior. It was kind of mesmerizing, actually, watching him meticulously gather the dust bunnies and corral them into separate bags._

_Of course the sharp vibration of her phone startled her. She pulled it out and looked at the screen. Unknown caller. She sighed and answered anyway._

_"Martinez," she quipped_

_"Hello, Jo." The eerie voice replied. "Henry's there with you, right? Give him the phone."_

_Jo pulled the phone from her ear and cautiously gave it to Henry. That voice gave her the creeps. If anything was awry about it, and she sensed there was, she would track the phone back at the precinct._

_"Henry."_

_It was all he, the eerie voice Henry knew all too well, said when Henry took the phone. He was close enough to be watching._

_"Hello?" Henry asked, trying to keep the conversation as normal-sounding as possible to Jo. She needn't worry. He would do it for her._

_He stopped gathering the dust bunnies and rose to look out the window, scouting the area for anyone on a phone. This was New York, who was he kidding, everyone was on a phone._

_"Don't try to look for me, Henry. You'll never find me until I find you. The sad part is that you know me already. I'd think after two centuries a man could tell his friends from his foes. I guess I'd think wrong. And I'm not often wrong."_

_"I may not know who you are right now, but trust me, when I do, there'll be hell to pay." Henry growled. He took off down the stairs at Adam's first word, keeping low so he wouldn't be seen through the intermittent windows in the tower, and was now at street level, looking out the small panes of glass on the old apartment complex's front doors. Watching._

_It was only a matter of time before Adam, wherever he was, saw Jo following Henry's flight down the flight of stairs. He had to think fast._

_"Too bad you'll never know where to find me when im finished."_

_It was luck, really. Henry was too surprised by the fact that the one man he was watching had lipped the exact same words as Adam had spoken to notice exactly what those words were._

_"It's not as If I can't find you again." He said, almost threatening, but staying calm enough so as not to reveal that he had indeed identified Adam. And indeed he was someone Henry knew, not very well but nonetheless he knew Adam, and he wondered himself why he hadn't seen this coming._


	8. Chapter 8

Jo whipped her head around to see whom Henry was referring to, but only saw their reflections. Confused, she thought through everyone who was supposed to be outside watching the questioning. Reece and Hanson, for sure. Perhaps Lucas had come up from the ME's office for some reason. Neither of the two men seemed a viable option for this threat Henry perceived. He was too sane for that.

He also just murdered a man right in front of you, Jo reminded herself.

"The only men out there are Hanson and maybe Lucas. It's not either of them, is it?"

She asked just to be safe. And to quell the niggling doubt in the back of her own mind that she could be so misinformed as to one of their attentions.

"Goodness no," Henry smiled, even laughed a little at the preposterousness of her suggestion. "No, neither of them. Detective, did the Lieutenant ever tell you what happened when the paramedics went to recover the body?"

"I haven't had a chance to talk to her about that, no. And neither have you..." She began a bit dubiously, and going in no direction whatsoever.

"You should ask her, Detective. Trust me."

{*.*.*.*}

_The scent of rotting fish, unwashed bodies, and overloads of salt to mask it attacked his nostrils. The marketplace was freshly replenished with new goods from the sister ship of his own, which had just docked a few hours ago. The sailor watched as crate after crate of highly-taxed British goods rolled off of the vessel and onto American soil._

_He watched his comrades disembark the ship. No, not comrades. Coworkers. fellow seamen._

_The sailor wasn't the type to make friends._

_He was the silent one, the one who shared nothing but knew everything. He kept track of each and every man aboard the vessels, not for their own safety, but for his own._

_He was paranoid, extremely paranoid. He had a secret, and a big secret at that. A secret that could get him killed, time and time again were it possible, were the secret discovered. He couldn't go the way that doctor had. Then again, why would he be defending a slave to begin with?_

_The doctor. So young, so naïve. He really though he could change the tide of racism…_

_The sailor continued to watch his vessel;s sister ship as the crew disembarked. He tallied off the men he knew were supposed to be there, only as a way to pass the endless monotony called time. Captain, first mate, a few deckswabbers, that doctor he'd killed on the other ship…_

_The sailor strode forward to get a better view. That had to just be a new crewmember he hadn't met yet. Not the man insane enough to die for a slave. He'd died. Bullet to the heart, blood spattered all over the cabin, heavy body thrown into the ocean, sunk to the depths of the Atlantic. Not alive and disembarking in New York._

_Though when the sailor had returned to clean the blood from the walls, it was mysteriously vanished… much like his own had after the guillotining in the Revolution twenty years prior..._

_Maybe the sailor wasn't so alone in this world_.

{•*•*•*•}

"It was gone."

Jo stared dumbfounded at her superior.

"What?"

"I didn't want to tell you this until we had a full confession from Hen-_the suspect_-but right when you called in and told me you'd apprehended him, the switchboard was lighting up with panicked calls from 38th and Park that the man who'd been shot had disappeared. They said he and all the blood on the street were just gone."

"How?" Jo stuttered. "You can't just..."

"I'm sorry, Jo, but we don't have a body." Reece shook her head.

"I _saw_ it, Joanna. I saw that man fall down and lay there on the sidewalk bleeding out from a gunshot would inflicted by of all people Henry freaking Morgan and you tell me that all of that somehow vanished into thin air?"

"I'm just as confused as you are, Jo. But there's no evidence as of right now tying Henry to any bodies. Or that there even was a body."

Jo was angry, incredulous, gesticulating wildly with her hands. How could there just not be a crime scene? How does a man shot through the heart manage to vanish into thin air? Worst of all, why didn't anyone seem to believe her?

"What was it then, some sort of mass-hallucination?" She demanded.

"I do believe that if you continue questioning the suspect, you'll get all your answers."

Henry was leaning away from the table, as far as his restraints allowed him, looking out the door Jo had left open when she went to talk to Reece. He quickly raised and lowered his eyebrows as further intimation.

Reece nodded, and Jo turned back to Henry. "And what exactly do _you_ know about this disappearing corpse, Henry?"

"Well, for one," he began matter-of-factly, "he was just brought in and booked for public nudity."

* * *

><p><em>ayenn: happy thanksgiving, y'all!<em>


	9. Chapter 9

"Hanson. Go down to civil and get the names of all the streakers from the last two hours."

"We're looking for a _dead_ body, Martinez."

"Yeah, well, Henry says the guy was here and for some odd reason I'm still believing him." Jo sighed. "It's not like we have any better choice."

"Already going," Hanson called over his shoulder right as he turned to leave. He followed the path of the man Henry had seen toward the civil affairsdepartment. When Hanson had disappeared from their sight, another, much older, man appeared from the other side.

Abe came over to Jo and Reece, holding out the clothes on his arms.

"He probably needs these."

"No I don't, Abraham."

Henry was somehow leaning further out the door than before. It looked as if he were perfectly positioned and quite comfortably sitting, the chair even able to rock back on its two back legs.

"Henry, did you _move_ the table?" Jo uttered with incredulity and a bit of disappointment. Confusion and worry crossed her face.

"...perhaps?" He offered her. He then continued conversing with Abraham, quite casual in his demeanor.

"I'll explain everything when we get out of here."

Jo stepped back in the doorway, blocking Abe and Henry's view of each other. "This is an interrogation in a criminal case. No more visiting. Kapiche?" She gave a stern look to both of the Morgan men, then closed the door and pulled her chair over to where Henry had moved the table.

"Seriously, how did you move this? You're handcuffed to it, for God's sake."

"The little bowl there where the handcuffs attach works as a handle, see?" He grabbed the small metal bar and the chainattached to his left wrist and, with his right hand under the tabletop, pulled the metal plateau an inch closer to himself. Jo sighed for the umpteenth time that day.

"Guess we'll be investing in more secure tables."

Henry smiled. Jo glared back, tapping her pen on the table next to her very thin case file. He put his free hand up in surrender.

"Let's keep going, shall we?"

Jo nodded and reopened the manila folder, pulling out a blank sheet, and clicked her pen off the tabletop. She poised her right hand over the parchment, then looked up at Henry.

"All right. What led you to believe that this man, whoever he is, was a threat to me?"

He wished he could give a straightforward answer, but the whole truth would only pose more questions. The question became, to Henry, not _if_ to tell the truth, but _how_ to tell the truth without having to bring up his own immortality. He had thought about this a small bit over the last few weeks, after he'd received the letter and the phone call. The threats had been escalating, appearing more and more places. Though he'd identified the _voyeur_ at long last, Henry still didn't know how he got into all these places or where he was going to be next.

If only Adam wasn't such a textbook psychopath…

{*.*.*.*}

"_I've decided to be nice and warn you this time."_

"_Warn me about what?" Henry said with a fearful tone._

"_This week. One of them. Choose your battle wisely."_

_The line went dead before Henry had a chance to reply to Adam's threat. He slowly put the phone back in its cradle, but otherwise did not move a muscle. As much as he didn't want to admit it to himself, he knew exactly what his stalker was up to._

_He'd been sending threats for weeks now. Always ambiguous, never signed, never tracked. They seemed to lean toward one of the two, then suddenly swerved to the other, keeping Henry on edge as to who and when he needed to watch out for. _

_The last one, that had almost made him pass out. He slowly went back down to the laboratory to look at it again, remind himself of the severity of the battle before him._

_It lied on the lab table, the more disturbing side facedown. He knew it was pork, the DNA analysis he'd done in the lab had confirmed it, but he couldn't get the awful image of some maniac doing that to his son out of his head._

_Henry flipped over the raw pork and let the image flood his brain again. Chills crept up his spine as he read the small line of blacknumbers and letters. A line identical to Abe's tattoo._

_When he'd received the package at work, he'd immediately rushed back to the apartment, afraid of what he would find. Relief coursed through his body when he opened the door to see a very alive Abe at work in the kitchen. With no explanation to his son whatsoever, Henry wrapped his arms around Abe's neck, then, as he let go, traced the inked brand the Nazis had given him, and left as abruptly as he appeared._

_Henry stayed late at work that night, examining the macabre meat, and along with it the curious locks of hair that he hadn't noticed before in his sheer panic over Abe's well-being. He sent these through the DNA test, though he had a feeling who they were from._

_Hoping against hope she would've actually clocked out at five like the rest of the detectives, Henry scurried upstairs to Jo's desk. Luckwas indeed on his side, for not only was she gone, but he discovered she kept a spare brush in er desk. Not surprising, considering._

_He pulled just a few strands from the brush, then put everything back exactly as he had left it and returned to the morgue._

_When the DNA results came back on the mystery hair and the detective's hair, they were one and the same._

_Adam had had to have gotten close enough to Abe to perfectly copy the tattoo, and close enough to Jo to snip a lock of her hair. And that scared the heck out of Henry. How could he protect them from the monster? He wasn't omnipresent, nor omnipotent, and neither was Adam, but the mysterious man seemed to be so from the way he orchestrated the chaos in Henry's world so perfectly._

_The question was, now, how could Henry save them both?_


	10. Chapter 10

"He's sent me threats. Anonymous, of course. Here, at the shop, over the phone even. I'd thought they were pranks at first, some disgruntled someone connected to an investigation."

Henry tried to remain as casual and calm as possible. He didn't want to worry her. But just thinking of all Adam had done, all he threatened to do… It was a formidable struggle.

"And as a supposed loyal employee of the police department andmoreso my _partner_, you felt that keeping this information to yourself would be beneficial _why_?" she asked with concern. A concern she masked with anger. She couldn't understand Henry's motive, not yet, so all she could see was some sort of unintended betrayal on her friend's part.

"I didn't want to worry you, Detective," Henry shrugged, looking to his palms. "Surely you get threats from disgruntled family and friends from time to time... It's never been anything to worry about, has it?"

"Obviously it _was_ worth worrying about, Henry. I know you too well. You were the man who demanded we keep investigating VickyHulquist's death because you knew it was murder, even when no one believed you. You hated when Hanson and I labeled Raul's death as an ADJ. You're the one who told me I should feel horrible after I'd… disabled the Soul Slasher murderer, because, and I quote, the day that killing someone doesn't affect you, that's when you havereal problems. You could not, would not, kill anyone. Ever. And yet somehow you have, and you're not acting in any way remorseful."

Jo paused, looking right into Henry's brown eyes. She found her hands moving toward him, resting on his own, whichwere folded in front of him on the table.

"It's like you're a different person, Henry. Why? What did he tell you he was going to do to me that you would cross every line and shoot him dead?"

{*.*.*.*}

_"I'm not going to harm you, Abby."_

_He sauntered about in front of her, his pompous, above-everything demeanor shining through. His hands were folded behind his back, and he seemed to use the fist formed by them to push his chest up and out. _

_The woman could do nothing but watch him. She had a gag stuffed in her mouth, and was putting all her focus into taking one more breath. Her arms and legs were tied to the chair, restraining her completely. She felt her eyes begin to well with tears and blinked profusely in an effort to stop them._

_"It is Abigail, right?"_

_Abigail's reply was in the widening of her cerulean eyes in sheer terror._

_"I thought so." Her captor grinned. He walked over to the window from which he could see the quad of Berkeley, where Henry and Abe were walking, and abruptly yanked the blinds down, filling the room with utter darkness. He carefully made his way to the end table, whereupon sat a lamp with a stained-glass shade. He pulled the cord and a prismatic rainbow shimmered eerily about the room._

_"You're here because of a certain doctor... Henry Morgan, I believe? Yes, anyway, I do believe you know his little secret, being the first wife he's had in a long time and all."_

_Abigail glared at the man, though he was impossible to see clearly from all the various light patterns and colors cast from the artistic lampshade._

_"You didn't really think you were his only love, did you? No, he's had plenty of wives. I would know. See, and I've never told anyone this, but,"_

_The man leaned closer to her, uncomfortably closer. The breath he expelled with his words dusted her skin and sent chills from each cell it touched._

_"I'm immortal, too."_

_He was now kneeling in front of her, his hands on hers. He traced her cheek with his finger. Abigail stiffened at his touch, though she was already quite tense and wouldn't have believed she could be any more so._

_He then put his arms around her neck and untied the gag, letting it fall to her lap. His hands stayed put. If anything, they inched forward to her chin. He drew his face closer and closer, and before his lips locked onto hers, he whispered in her ear, "Kiss me, Abigail. You're mine now."_

* * *

><p><em>I might be getting a little fast with finishing this up, what with that CLIFFHANGER for episode 11! *panics*<em>


	11. Chapter 11

Henry swallowed, his expression pained. He gathered his thoughts, struggling with how much to tell the detective without revealing his secret.

"Last week, I received another mystery package in my office. They've been coming since around the time we started working together. Anyhow, this one was... It destroyed me, Jo. It was this large, fleshy cut of meat, chemically treated to resemble human skin."

Jo's eyes widened.

"It was just pork." Henry quipped in aside. "I may have done a couple unauthorized DNA tests."

"That really doesn't matter on top of the impending murder charges," she sighed. "Continue."

"All right, the worst part of those as that whoever had sent it, Adam, we'll call him for simplicity's sake, Adam had tattooed in the same ID number as is on my associate Abraham's arm."

"So this Adam guy is threatening Abe too?" Jo asked incredulously. "Henry, you had someone forge you _a slice of your friend's forearm_ and you thought you could handle this yourself‽"

"That's not all, Detective. When I returned to the office after checking on Abraham's well-being, I found a lock of dark hair in the corner of the box. Another unauthorized DNA test, along with some hairs I lifted from the brush in your desk, revealed they were yours."

All she could do was blink. Maybe if she opened and closed her eyes enough times, this absurd reality would just disappear.

Henry took his hands from under hers and gently caressed her palm, in hopes of mollifying the distraught detective. She flinched at the touch, then acquiesced to it, but just as suddenly ripped herself from his gentle touch and abruptly left the room.

"You finish, Hanson." she uttered as she closed the interrogation room door behind her. Without another word, Jo fled the interrogation suite and left Hanson and Reece staring at each other, trying to figure out what exactly about Henry's confession had perturbed her so.

She couldn't take it. She was believing him. Every piece and detail of Henry's story, she was sold on it being the truth. And she couldn't question him on this, she was too biased. She wondered why on earth Reece let her question Henry in the first place, seeing as she was a prime witness to the shooting.

Henry didn't lie, not about something as drastic as murder. There was a stalker, there just had to be. And whoever this Adam character was, it seemed he wanted Jo, not Henry, either dead or in his clutches.

{*.*.*.*}

"_Good evening, Mrs. Morgan."_

_The blonde woman, frightened out of her wits, nodded deferentially and managed to choke out a reciprocatory greeting. She was answered with the palm of a large hand connecting to her jaw. A slap hard enough to stun her, but to show no marks._

"_You're not Mrs. Morgan anymore. When someone addresses you as her…"_

_Abigail attempted to speak, but nothing beyond a small noise of fear escaped her throat. _

"_Come now, use your words, dear."_

"_You… must have me mistaken with someone else. Lydia Dawson." Abigail incanted, robotically raising her right hand in a handshake._

"_Good, Abby." he praised, in such a condescending and malicious tone that it wouldn't be considered praise had she not learned that it was so._

"_Lydia." she jumped to correct him. That was the only way to survive. Play his games._

_He nodded, allowing a small smile to cross his features. "You learn quickly, mother."_

"_Aunt." she corrected. "I've raised you… since your parents passed away. She was my sister."_

"_And what were their names, Auntie Lydia?"_

_He turned from his pacing to look at her, that evil grin overtaking his face. Abigail swallowed her fear as much as she could and uttered the required response._

"_Morgan. Henry and Abigail Morgan."_

"_And how, may I ask, though it may scar my poor, innocent, youthful soul, did they die?"_

_He smiled again. That malicious smile of pure evil. He smiled like that often, usually describing his plans for his latest murder. Including her own._

_The answer to this question, Abigail knew, was what her captor threatened to do to her and Henry were she not to coöperate with him. He hadn't said it explicitly, but the details of the murder were explicit enough. She had it memorized, ingrained in her brain, so much so that it haunted her dreams the nights she succumbed to sleep._

"_Tragically. It must have been a serial killer, they said. They didn't let any of the family see the bodies. They were mangled beyond recognition, your parents. Blood, everywhere… so much blood…"_

_It was all she could verbalize. Picturing her and Henry's mangled corpses, bones broken, limbs severed, arteries sliced. Blood spattered everywhere, staining every last inch of the stark-white room. She always pictured it in a white room._

_But it wouldn't be both of them. He wouldn't go to the trouble of killing Henry when he'd just come back again. No. This fate, the fate of being brutally killed, was for her and her alone._

_She wouldn't even let herself think that her captor wouldn't bat an eyelid doing it to Abe._


	12. Chapter 12

"Good evening, Lieutenant."

Henry gave the woman a slight nod of deference. He sat on the edge of a very solid cot in one of the overnight holding cells, hands on his lap, the scarf balled up between his fingers.

"Same to you, Doctor Morgan," she replied coolly. "I assume you are aware that we've assigned all of your pending cases to Doctor Wahl."

"So I presumed. I probably shouldn't return here unless I'm being arraigned, as well."

"That implies that you've been bailed out."

Henry returned the distant statement with a simple look, a look that said all he needed.

"And that's why I'm here. Your, erm, Abraham fronted the money so you'll be going home. The deal is, though, you'll be taking a little friend."

Reece held out a thick band with an even thicker battery pack attached. A tracker anklet.

"If you go anywhere off of your home property, this calls us, and we won't be so lenient next time. Trust me."

"I completely understand, Lieutenant. I will remain at the antique shop until further notice. I appreciate the clemency considering the circumstances."

"The only reason you're getting out of here as free a man as you are," Reece said as she snapped the tracker on his right ankle, "is the fact that there wasn't a body. When we find it, you'll be back. For a long time."

There wasn't much either of the two could say. Reece had lost all respect for him, and was immensely bothered by the fact that he was probably going to get away with murder. It had taken a long time for her to begin to trust his eccentric yet precise instincts, but a part of her had remained wary. She had thought in the back of her mind that something like this might happen. She'd hoped it would be more along the lines of petty theft than murder, though.

Henry was acutely aware of the tenuous trust between the two that had shattered to pieces. He knew words would not suffice for an apology, nothing would suffice, truly, but he tried his best to convey his sorrow and shame in his eyes. If only she would actually look at him again. Every time she spoke, she looked somewhere else, usually the wall behind him, slightly over his shoulder. Shutting him out was her way of dealing with this. Henry understood. He was, after all, quite adept at shutting others out from his own emotions.

Reece led him down the hall of cells, past the drunkards and general riff-raff who had landed in the precinct for the night. They watched him with envy and malice as his footsteps echoed through the hall. Henry remained resolute in posture, keeping his head held high. He blocked out the sounds of the other inmates' jeers and paced his steps with his deep inhalations.

Once he was out of the cell block, he found himself in a small white room. Memories of the past drifted through his mind, haunting him even more on top of the day's events. A shiver ran through his body, and in that he found comfort. This was not England, not 1814. No psychiatric hospital, nor a straitjacket restraining his arms.

Also there was Abe. He stood across the room, the change of clothes he'd brought still hanging over his arm, covering the tattoo. He gave a sad smile as Henry walked over and put his arm around Abe's shoulders. Henry held his son close and whispered a thank you. It was all he could say then, there.

There was so much more he needed to say, so much explaining he had yet to do, but not here, not now.

Reece let the two have their moment. Even if Henry had committed murder, the father/son hug still touched her, albeit she had mixed up who exactly was the father and the son.

{*.*.*.*}

"I got the names."

Hanson tossed a small stack of papers onto Jo's desk. The paperclipped sheets spun around across the surface, finally coming to a stop upside-down in front of her. He leaned a hand on the desk as she flipped them to the proper orientation and began to study them.

"What took so long?"

"Turns out one of the guys was a regular. They wouldn't let me leave until I heard the whole spiel."

"They have regulars?"

"Yeah, a couple of 'em. Henry's one, oddly enough. Anyhow, this guy, he's never given 'em a real name. John Doe. Pretty creative, ain't it?"

Jo rolled her eyes. She shuffled the papers until she found the file Hanson was talking about, then followed along with the notes as he continued.

"They say they always catch the guy in the backs of restaurants or grocery stores. Usually in or around the freezer."

"So I see here…" she paused, scanning the sheet. Charge, witnesses, date of offenses, sentence, etcetc…

Wait, what was that one line again?

"It says his first offense was in the 40's,"

Jo opened the rap sheet to the first record, a carbon copy that had been photocopied almost to illegible oblivion. Hanson leaned over her shoulder and scanned the information. Nudity, meat locker, Dorset meat market, May 18, 1947.

"How old _is_ this guy, Hanson?"

"That's the weird part of the story. See, they get multiple people coming in, either not giving a name or giving a bullcrap one. They eventually figure out who they are from other records, previous offenses, that sort of thing. This guy, our John Doe, he looks about thirty years old. Every officer down in civil who's worked there has booked the guy once in their lives and they all agree on his appearance. And it's not just a similar-looking guy-the man's always missing part of his left foot and about half of his left ring finger from, get this, _gangrene_.

"The man doesn't age, or so they claim. I wouldn't even be believing it myself were it not for multiple sergeants affirming it. And this ageless guy, he always comes in with some sort of wound, beyone the mystery gangrene, of course. He'll have burn marks, slashes in his flesh, though they're not fatal, they're placed as if they could be had they gone any deeper."

"Did they say if he had any wounds this time?"

"Mmhmm. A big one, on the left side of his chest. Looked for all it was worth like a bullet to the heart."

{*.*.*.*}

_Adam returned at long last to his flat. He would have destroyed the place, were it not already completely trashed from its previous occupants. But that's what you get for straight cash in the disreputable neighborhoods._

_Paperwork did not suit him, it did not suit any immortal. That's what confounded him so about how Henry was able to maintain a job and citizenship and basic documentation. Then again, he usually kept a job in places where those documents were easily accessible. He'd probably just stocked up on new papers every so often._

_As much as he despised being murdered, and being murdered by Henry of all people, Adam had to admit this had been one of the most exciting days of the last century. He couldn't believe that the John Doe story was still flying down in civil affairs; the officers had had to catch on that he looked the same as he did thirty years ago._

_Maybe he should get into more violent crimes. He'd get away with them. Better officer turnaround in departments where they might usually get shot at. Hence no one recognizing him from a case thirty years prior._

_That nursing home's probably catching on, too, he thought to himself as he changed out of the Goodwill-donated clothes given to him by the precinct and into some of his own. Not much longer now that he'd have to get away with it._

_Maybe he should just poison her and get it over with. Cyanide to the coffee, blame it on a lazy nurse… What could go wrong?_

_Adam didn't understand why exactly he couldn't ever bring himself to kill her. He'd had fifty-some years now to do the deed. He'd always rationalize that he needed bait for Henry to come, but he could just as easily lie and say she was still alive. It's not like he hadn't been lying for the better part of a millennium anyhow._

_And he was, at least in some places, a celebrated serial killer. _

_Celebrated, abhorred, the creature of fascination. No matter what people said about his deeds, they were intrigued. Very intrigued. He liked it. Everyone knew who he was, no one knew his name._

_So why couldn't he kill a 94-year-old woman?_

* * *

><p><em>little ayenn: so in my version of immortals, you (assuming you are immortal) retain both your original injury and, for a short time, the injury that last killed you. This arose from confusion on my part in the pilot whether Henry's chest wound was his original gunshot wound or from the metal rod impaling him. I realize now that this is sort of unrealistic, say you died from internal bleeding-you couldn't come back to life with more internal bleeding, or if you were strangled you wouldn't return with a still-crushed windpipe. There'd be a small scar on whatever internal organ bled, or bruising on your neck but nothing beyond a dermal evidence of your death, which heals in about two weeks (don't think that'll actually fit in this story but that's how it works in my mind) Any injury occurring beforeduring the original death, though, would remain. Hence Henry always has his bullet wound, and Adam, at least in my world, always has his gangrene._

_so that was actually the longest authors note I've ever written and I'm sorry if it made no sense..._

_Review anyway?(:_


	13. Chapter 13

The ride home was long and silent. Neither father nor son knew how to broach the subject of the day's events to the other. Abe was especially puzzled by what he'd discovered as he waited for answers at the precinct.

After Jo had shooed him away from the interrogation, Abe waited around outside the room, hoping to hear snippets of anything that would explain why Henry was being questioned, and what for. Eventually, the Lieutenant also told him to make himself scarce. Abe acquiesced and found himself wondering downstairs into the morgue, to his father's office.

Besides Jo, he'd never actually met any of Henry's coworkers. He had assumed the man watching the interrogation with the Lieutenant was Jo's partner Hanson. No one seemed to know his first name, and Abe, as everyone else, didn't dwell on that fact.

And now, down here in the glass-walled medical examination suite, he assumed the tall, lanky young doctor was the flighty Lucas. The doctor was currently leaning over the body of an elderly woman, carefully examining marks around her neck. He'd hold his hand over the wrinkled, dry skin, making rough measurements of the bruising and marking them down on the clipboard next to him.

Abe shuddered. All his life he'd been around death, and he still couldn't get used to the fact that people actually _wanted_ to do this with their lives.

He left the morgue and began the trek back up to the interrogation suite. Odd naming choice, made it sound like a luxury hotel used as a mob cover. _There's the honeymoon suite, and the interrogation suite. That's where all the deals go down. And beyond that is a lovely terrace cafe…_

The elevator stopped a few times on its way up the high-rise the 11th precinct called home base. Officers shuffled on and off, taking no notice of the septuagenarian on board. Abe barely took notice of his fellow passengers until one tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and was surprised to see a familiar face.

"Reade?" Abe asked.

"In the flesh," the young man declared ebulliently. It was his easygoing nature, that confidence with a dash of snarkiness. The two had met at a recent estate sale. Reade was new to the city, he'd explained, and didn't know what to expect in the antique business here. He'd taken over a family auction house in Pennsylvania, but sales were down and he thought he'd try a new market.

Abe had taken the man under his wing, in a way. He was glad to see the youth of this generation appreciating the value of history, and he'd do everything he could to help him thrive.

"What are you doing here?"

"Parking ticket. Didn't keep the meter happy, I guess." The young man flashed his wallet, empty from paying the fine. "Had to go to civil to pay. See you around, Abe."

The elevator dinged back up at the interrogation suite. Abe stepped out the doors and waved a small goodbye to his fellow antiquer. The doors closed, leaving him alone with more questions than he had answers.

_Wait, didn't you just mail in parking fines?_

It was then that Jo stormed out of the room and to her office. Abe watched as Hanson and the Lieutenant quietly argued with each other over the situation. He caught the words "shooting" and "homicide" and "murderer" too many times for him to not worry. In fact, just saying them once was enough to worry him. But he asked no questions, just waited until the questioning was over and Henry was led away. He inquired as soon as possible if there was bail, and paid accordingly to release his father.

Abe pulled to a stop at the curb outside the shop, making sure to hang his parking pass on the rear-view mirror. He and Henry went inside, through the store and up to the apartment, still silent. The only sound was that of the coffeemaker, percolating and bubbling, filling the room with the aroma of the ground beans.

"I owe you an explanation, Abraham," Henry sighed, sinking into the couch. He went to cross his legs and found his motion hampered by the tracker anklet, so he remained sitting forward, slightly slouched, chin in his hands. Weary, defeated.

Abe brought over the steaming cup of coffee and set it down in front of his father. The aroma danced its way to his nostrils, and Henry succumbed to the tantalizing scent and his own hunger from not having eaten all day, and took a sip. He set the mug back down and looked over at his son, who stared at him impatiently, his hands folded and a serious expression on his face.

"Damned right you do."

{*.*.*.*}

_Abe woke with a start. Nothing was familiar. This white place wasn't his room, this metal-framed bed not his bed, these strange tubes and bags and beeping monitors…_

_"Daddy, no!" he wailed. It didn't make sense that this was the first thought to come to his mind, but it was. At the sound of her son's voice, Abigail leapt up from her chair and laid a gentle kiss on his forehead._

_"Shh.. shh… you're alright, Abraham. you're alright," she consoled, caressing his forehead and holding his little hand in her own._

_Abe blinked a few times, adjusting to the light and getting his vision to focus._

_"Mummy?" he asked tentatively._

_"Mummy's here, Abe. Mummy's here." Abigail's mellifluous murmurings calmed her frightened child, and he slowly fell limp in her arms, succumbing again to sleep. Abigail carefully laid the boy back on the hospital bed and simply sat and watched the rise and fall of his little chest._

_He was alive, and that was all she could ask for._

_Behind her, the door to Abe's room in the pediatric ward slowly creaked open. Abigail paid it no mind, thinking Abe's nurse was due back to change the bandages on his leg wound. She wanted with all her heart to do it herself, she was just as good a nurse as anyone in the ward. And it was her son, she wanted the best care for him, and so she reluctantly and silently acquiesced to the hospital's care over her own. She knew she would've been too panicked at the accident scene to do anything useful._

_She was startled to feel the touch of a large, warm hand on her shoulder. Looking up, she saw the bright smile of her husband._

_"Henry!" she cried, jumping up from her chair to embrace her resurrected husband. He reciprocated the greeting, holding her closer and tighter with each passing second. They only loosened their grip to lock their lips in a passionate kiss, and just as quickly held each other close again._

_Henry finally let go, and tucked a wayward strand of Abigail's blonde curls behind her ear. "I told you I'd never leave you, darling."_

_The couple walked toward the bed, and the little sleeping form lying within. Henry reached down and gently ran his hand along his son's body._

_"How is he?" he asked, gravity and concern filling his voice._

_"From what I heard of the damage to the car, excellent. His left leg was sliced open, it cut a little bit of muscle, but nothing's broken. He woke up about an hour ago…"_

_Abigail paused, string again at the delicate features of her sleeping son. She could've lost him today. She could've lost both of them._

_"What is it, Abigail?"_

_She looked up to her husband, a melancholy cast over her eyes._

_"He woke up terrified. He.. he cried out for you. Henry, did Abe see you die?"_

{*.*.*.*}

"The accident we were in, when was it now... March 1953, I believe."

"What does you getting arrested today have to do with a car accident sixty years ago?" Abe asked. His eyes widened in realization as he remembered the life-altering events of that day. All of them.

"Your secret… did Jo-"

"No, thank goodness. Though explaining myself to her would be unequivocally easier were I to reveal it. No, Abraham, my secret's safe with you. Today I… I _might_ have gotten revenge on the man that plowed our automobile off of the freeway."

"Oh God, Henry, how did you even _remember_ him? Or find him? That guy'd probably be dead by now."

Henry took anther sip of the coffee, looking over the rim of the mug with a grim expression. "Not if he's got the same condition as me."


	14. Chapter 14

The week passed thoroughly uneventfully. Unless you could count the department's (including Jo and Hanson, of course) mounting frustrations with Lucas' autopsy work, or lack thereof, as eventful. With the major backups in the lab, Jo began dabbling in some cold cases, hoping maybe she could do something productive with those.

Lucas was a sweet guy, really, and he was a great mortician (though that may not be the most sought-after compliment), he just wasn't Henry. He took more time to find the minuscule details that seemed to jump out at Henry like a quality scarf. She'd gotten so used to the fast-paced results of a Henry Morgan-run lab that she'd forgotten how tediously slow the average mortician was at completing them.

But even with the cold cases, Jo couldn't concentrate on her work. She was too preoccupied, much too preoccupied, with thoughts of Henry dancing in her head.

_He probably would be a good dancer. Ballroom, obviously. He'd know a waltz or two._

_Damn it, Jo, concentrate. Amelia Hayes. You're reading the case file for Amelia Hayes. 36-year-old mother of two from Greenwich Village._

Another voice, with a more refined accent, began to whisper in her mind.

_Greenwich Village was, and still is, the place to be for rising artists. Whether acting, painting, or writing, all desired to be denizens of this quaint part of our great city._

Now she was giving herself Henry-lectures in her head. Jo didn't think she'd miss them so much; she'd always gotten annoyed when he went on his overly detailed rants. They were almost like reminiscing, come to think of it.

Jo found she didn't have to fight the strange Henry-lecturing part of her mind for long. A very excited Lucas had just appeared at her desk.

"Guess who just finished the autopsy of Rose Haverford?"

Jo quickly reached for a pen and her notepad. She poised the ballpoint ink device over the processed tree bark and looked back up at Lucas, who began tumbling out the details before she had to ask.

"The neck bruising was standard with a strangling, a little more intense because the vic was old. A few bruises on her arm likely from defending herself as well. Checked for prints on those and got a couple hits; they were all partials. Internally, as healthy as can be expected for an octogenarian. All in all, looks to me like exactly what Hen-what was described on-scene."

Lucas caught himself before saying Henry's name in front of the detective. They'd all been taking his absence hard, and it was understandable that she would be more so. He had, after all, shot someone in order to, as he claimed, protect her.

"Thanks for the update. And that suspect list," she nodded to the database info on the fingerprint semi-matches. "Hanson and I'll be right on it."

"Gotcha." Lucas nodded, biting his lower lip. "Hey, if there's anything else you need me to do, stakeouts, questioning, investigating suspects-"

"_Thank_ you, Lucas." Jo said emphatically, dismissing him with a small flick of her hand and a condescending look. The doctor hung his head in defeat and skulked away to his aseptic-white dungeon, the morgue.

Of course he'd ask to join the investigation. Jo had noticed, in fact the whole homicide division had noticed, that Lucas was almost trying_ too_ hard to be Henry. A few days ago, he'd come in wearing a paisley scarf. The pattern was much too gaudy for Henry to even consider wearing it, and it just made Lucas look even geekier than he was. No one had dared to say anything to him, though. The subject of their ME "on leave," as the Lieutenant had euphemistically phrased it, was probably the touchiest subject in the department.

Everyone knew that Henry was really under some sort of house arrest. And if they didn't, if they passed by Jo's desk and paid attention to the tabs open on her screen, they would.

She flicked back to that damning tab and various graphs, along with a radar-esque map, appeared on the screen. A little dot moved about the radar in a not-quite circular pattern. Reading the other graphs, Jo could see that the dot had been, more or less, travelling along the same path for the last hour.

That dot was Henry. Or rather, Henry's tracker anklet.

{*.*.*.*}

"You gonna be okay here on your own?"

"I have survived two world wars, Abraham. I think I will be alright."

"Ya sure?"

"_Abraham._"

"I'm going, I'm going." Abe sighed, shrugging into his coat. He turned back to Henry and said pointedly, "You know, most fathers aren't begging their sons to go out on a date."

"I'm not most fathers," Henry shrugged. "Now. You have a lovely evening with Fawn. Do not, under any circumstances, check up on me, or you will be grounded. Do you understand?"

"Yes, _Dad_."

"Very good." Henry walked across the shop to open the door for his aging son. A sharp wind, portending of the oncoming winter blustered through the door, casting a chill over father and son. Abe's collar was askew, and Henry couldn't help but fix it as his son passed through the doorway. Abe rolled his eyes.

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Henry offered as last minute advice before shutting the door. He had closed it and blocked in the warmth before he could hear Abe's reply, "Says the man under house arrest for suspected murder."

With Abe gone, Henry flipped the CLOSED sign on the front door, locked it, and made his way down to the lab. He hadn't anything else to do for the week, being placed on forced leave from work, and having this leave respected by his fellow officers, so he'd been analyzing the data of the last 200 years. Deaths, emergences, manner of death, time of death, other environmental factors, etcetera. He had formatted another hypothesis and was currently analyzing whether death in a group situation, like the subway crash, various WWII ambushes, and both World Trade center tragedies, kept him dead longer. The data was working out that indeed they did.

He wouldn't let himself think about Adam. After he'd disclosed to Abe that Adam had been bent on killing him and those he loved for presumably his whole life, he'd dropped the subject completely. The remorse was cutting him like a freshly sharpened blade, a blade never used before.

Even if the man was threatening him, even if he had threatened the safety of his son and his partner, even if he did send Henry evidence that he had taken Abigail all that time ago, that still gave Henry no real reason to kill. He should have just brought it up with Jo. Handling stalkers was a police matter, not something he could control himself. Sometimes, Henry noticed, he let his immortality begin to seem like invincibility.

That was exactly where Adam wanted him, wasn't it? A feeling of such invincibility that he would do anything and expect to get away with it.

And so Henry saw that, in trying to save others from the clutches of the ruthless immortal, he himself had begun to fall into them.


	15. Chapter 15

_Adam held his coat tight against the blustering wind. It wasn't terribly cold at the moment, but after the incident, he was so loathe to frozen places that the slightest touch of a chill send him searching for fire or a blanket. Usually fire. Fire was so much more entertaining._

_He had to keep moving. With the gangrene on his foot, he couldn't feel the cold of the ground, and he wasn't sure whether to count this as a curse or a blessing._

_After miles of walking, he found the building he was looking for. A small corner shop, painted black, with golden lettering and detail advertising the name of the shop._

_He'd been here before. Lots of times. The whole new-identity stunt was working quite well._

_He smiled to himself as he removed a set of keys from his pocket. Yes, the stunt was going well. So well that the owner had entrusted him with an extra key in order to pick up the pieces he'd bought for his own store. Except he wasn't going to buy anything, nor did he own another antique shop._

_As he opened the door, Adam made sure to grab and remove the jingling bells from the door frame. He knew that, contrary to the locked door, darkened lights, and obvious CLOSED sign, that there was indeed someone there. Someone Adam wanted to keep believing he was alone._

_Once inside, he relocked the door and began exploring the store. He knew there was a way to the lab somewhere in here, but he wasn't sure which rug to look under for the trapdoor. Luck was on his side, as the first Oriental rug he lifted covered an iron handle and oddly-cut floorboards. He took the ring in his hand, and with a silent, fierce pull, opened the hatchway into the dark below._

_As he noiselessly descended the steps, he began to analyze his surroundings. Everything was to the left, the right side of the stair nothing more than a stone wall, contrary to the trapdoor's location above. Beakers and flasks sat empty on rusty metal shelves. An antique dresser with a slightly off-track drawer revealed what looked to be some torture devices. A small window on the wall opposite the stair filtered light onto a small herb garden, and an oddly-juxtaposed crimson poinsettia. Centrally located was a large table that looked like a now-obsolete operating table._

_Immediately below him was a desk, a kerosene lantern hanging above to provide light to the brunet diligently working underneath. Adam leaned back against the wall as he continued to descend lest he cast a shadow on the man's papers and announce his arrival too early._

_When he reached the bottom, Adam pulled from his right pocket a syringe. He inverted it and watched the liquid flow and bubble around. Then with silent, practiced steps, he snuck behind the man and injected him behind the ear._

_{*.*.*.*}_

Henry awoke in a daze. He'd just been analyzing the minute details of the subway crash when he'd imagined a needle prick behind his ear, much in the same way as one had so maliciously pierced the conductor. He must have dozed off at some point. He hadn't been getting much sleep for the past month, his body had begun to take it when it needed.

His next thought was of the lamp above him. _Never let a lamp burn without watching it, Henry. It could burn the whole house down._

His mother's long forgotten and almost obsolete reprimand sprang him awake in fear that he _had_ burned the whole house down. He moved to rise up from the chair, but to no avail. Perplexed, Henry looked toward his unmoving limbs. Heavy iron chains were wrapped around each leg and arm, and one of the chair's legs was precariously close to the burning lamp, which had somehow ended up on the floor.

"_Hello, Henry_."

A man came out of the shadows, though somehow he still appeared to be wrapped in them. His dark cloak and fedora made him look like a stereotypical Mafia man. He held his hands in the deep pockets of the trench coat and had the collar popped so Henry could only see a small fraction of his face, which was bathed in shadow from all of his garments. The whites of his dark eyes glowed with a mysterious evil, and his growing maniacal grin added to the portentous effect.

"Adam." His captive growled.

"Oh, come now, Henry, you know more of my names than that."

With his right hand, Adam ran his hand along the back of the chair, anchoring himself to the spindles as he paced around his captive. With each identity he revealed, he became even more condescending in his tone.

"Gregory Downs, first mate on the _Regal_. Remember the _Regal_? You really thought we'd listen to a measly Welsh doctor. What was his name again? Oh, that's right. He didn't have one, he was a _slave_."

"His name was Clive*, and he didn't deserve to die." Henry uttered through gritted teeth.

"Horrid business, all that was. Believe me, when I saw you disembarking from the _Royal_, I was intrigued. You, Henry Morgan, were the first person I'd ever met who couldn't die."

"What do you want with me, Adam?" Henry demanded.

The shadowed man gave him a smug grin. "Patience, dear Henry. We have to fill all the holes in the bucket before I dump the truth out on you."

"William Bennett, London butcher in the 1870's. I thought it'd be fun for you to see the results of my handiwork, so I told them I was busy. Wasn't it nice to meet Mary Kelly?"

"So it _was_ you all this time," Henry glared at the figure behind him as best as he could. "You were Jack the Ripper."

"William the Ripper, technically. But who am I to rewrite history? While I've got a captive audience," Adam laughed, literally pulling Henry's chains, "I'm also the Zodiac killer. And behind the anthrax in the mail."

Henry tensed against the chain's pull. The rough, rusty metal scraped against his forearms and ripped into his skin. His legs knocked against each other, his ankles obstructed from doing so by the tracker.

_Adam had left the tracker._

"Kidding, kidding. Can't you take a little joke, Henry?"

Adam was now facing Henry, though his actual face was obscured from view. He rested his hand on the table beside him and carefully slid a small dagger out of his sleeve. He leaned casually, crossing his feet and almost absentmindedly cleaning the blade.

"You know who could take a joke?"

He suddenly thrust the dagger across the room. Henry pushed himself back against the seat to avoid the sharpened edges as they whizzed past his face. He heard a small crash, a shattering of sorts, and turned his head toward their source.

Glass lay in shards across his desk. The dagger at first appeared to be sticking straight up, but with the vector at which it had been thrown, it couldn't have possibly landed that way.

Adam reached over and grabbed the dagger's hilt, lifting along with it a broken picture frame.

_Abigail._

"What did you do to her?" Henry demanded. He thrust himself toward Adam. His chains rattled and echoed in the dungeon-like chamber.

Adam jumped back and ran behind Henry. He returned a moment later with the lamp in his hand.

"Be careful, Henry. Playing with fire can be dangerous."

The flame danced inside its glass cage, casting eerie shadows about the room. The light made it easier to see Adam's darkened face, but Henry could make out no more than a pallid skin tone and a lock of hair similar to his own. Adam began to lean closer until nothing separated the two men save the lantern.

"No one kills me and gets away with it."

{•*•*•*•}

"Hey Hanson. Did Lucas tell you the news?"

Hanson looked up from his computer screen to see Jo casually leaning on the top of the cubicle-esque divider. He quirked his brow as she waved the papers in her right hand. He reached up, snatched them and began to scan the information.

"Print matches for the scarf strangling. We're still waiting on the DNA, but with the _expedient_ manner the morgue and the lab have been working on those results, we might as well do a little process of elimination of our own."

Hanson chuckled at his partner's exasperated sarcasm.

"Finally," He sighed rolling his eyes. "I was afraid you'd say he'd gotten a new comic book."

"Nope. Just a list of suspects _to_ book."

Hanson deadpanned at Jo's ridiculous pun. He rose from the desk, still giving her his look of disapproval. "Make another pun like that and you'll be finding a new partner." He put his arm around her and gave her a light shove forward. "Let's go find our killer."

"Not so fast, detectives."

Jo and Hanson turned back around. Reece was standing in her doorway, her gaze fixed on the two detectives. Jo and Hanson flicked their eyes at each other, then back to the Lieutenant. She nodded and motioned them into her office.

"What's up, Lieu?" Hanson asked as he and Jo settled into the chairs in front of her desk. Reece stood on the other side and turned her computer's monitor toward them.

"Have you taken a look at Doctor Morgan's tracking device recently?"

She directed the question to Jo. Hanson joined in the intimating look.

"What?" she asked defensively. Her partner and superior didn't waver in their stares.

"Okay, so _maybe_ I have the tracker open all day. That doesn't mean I'm constantly watching it. In fact, I have been spending the past hour writing up questions for the suspects in the Haverford murder. Lucas and the lab techs were able to analyze some fingerprint fragments and give us a short list of names to investigate."

To prove she did more than worry and/or obsess over Henry, Jo offered her superior the thin suspect files and the case notes of the scarf strangling. Reece pushed them back into the detective's hands.

"I don't care how often you watch the tracker, Detective Martinez, so long as you pay attention to all of your cases. However, there has been some… irregular activity."

Reece swung her monitor around to the two detectives. The GPS chart remained dormant, and the graphs on the side indicated that Henry had remained in whatever position he was in for some time. Yet the tracker was alerting every few minutes that he had gone out of the approved range.

"Is it shorting out or something?" Hanson asked, peering at the data before him.

Jo nodded in agreement. "Sometimes these do go a little haywire when the batteries are running low. But you said you'd checked it before you banded him, right Lieu?"

Reece nodded. "The only other thing that could be causing this erratic behavior could be-"

The three finished her thought in unison. "Electricity."

* * *

><p><em>Was it just me or did the last episode kind of seem really similar to this story? Then again, I did write it, so I might see little nuances that you as a reader do not.<em>

_ Note to anyone who just started reading this, I wrote everything you've read so far before episode 11._

_*other note: Clive comes from my story (currently on hold but will be picked up after I finish this one) Halfway Done, but Barely There_

_Hope you don't mind footnotes(:_


	16. Chapter 16

The jolt of electricity, needless to say, shocked Henry. Its power was augmented by the iron chains, paralyzing his legs and arms even more where the chains wrapped around them. He struggled to hold in his agonized cries of pain.

Adam stepped back and with that, the surges of electric current subsided. The man in shadows slowly waved a taser in his right hand.

"Our fun is just beginning, Henry. The more you resist, the more pain I'll bring. And trust me, I know _exactly_ how to play the human body to the brink of death. Then again, if I do screw up, you won't be gone long."

"Rule number one," Adam commanded, flipping the taser in his hand. He caught the hand grip and pointed the dangerous end at his captive. "Don't ask any more questions."

Henry could do nothing but nod. He had never hoped so fiercely to die. Not even in the asylum, in the daily waterboardings, did he actually want to die. Not that he wanted to remain dead permanently, but to simple escape the clutches of Adam.

So why couldn't he do it? All he had to do was defy Adam's simple rules, and he would be electrocuted to his latest death. The answer was simple: The more you die, the more you fear death.

"I've been trying to get you on my side for so long, Henry. _So_ _long_." Adam purred. "I thought that by taking everything you loved, that you would join me.

"I've tried to kill you, numerous times. Some successful, others not so much. I assume you know that you weren't the only one who was supposed to die on that freeway in 1953, right?"

"Abe." Henry whispered, his utterance so quiet that it could've been merely a breath.

"What was that, Henry?" Adam asked, his tone oozing with condescension.

"You ran me off that road to kill my _son_!" the doctor growled, pulling against his restraints in a lunge toward his captor. His blood boiled through his veins, adrenaline surged through his body. Not only did Adam know how to push him to the brink physically, he knew exactly how to torture his mind, his reason.

Adam didn't flinch at Henry's burst forward. He simply raised the taser and applied electric current. The surge threw Henry's body back, the chains vibrated against his limbs with the current running through them. In his agony, he failed to notice yet another pinpoint source of the pain; the tracking device shorted out, sending an extra shockwave along his leg.

"Rule number two. Do not question my methods," He tapped the taser on Henry's arm. Henry flinched at the device's touch, though Adam had given it no power to shock him.

"And for the final nail in the unburied coffin," Adam began, lifting the long-forgotten dagger and its paper victim from the table, "Abigail."

He held the black-and-white portrait in front of himself, such that the dagger was pointed at Henry. Adam reached out and removed the portrait, still holding the dagger with his free hand, and flung the paper at Henry. It landed on his lap, Abigail's perpetual smile looking up at him. A small slit was in the background of the photo, where Adam's dagger had landed.

"I think it'd be wise to tell you the real truth, not that pile of baloney in my quote-unquote confession letter."

Henry opened his mouth to speak, but every sentence he began, he halted. Everything he wanted to say would result in his tasing, Adam likely making him black out this time, and who knows what he would do with his captive unconscious.

"I never killed Abby. No. I simply... Oh, how can I put this euphemistically… _reconditioned_ her."

{*.*.*.*}

Outside the antique shop, a nondescript Chevy pulled up to the curb. From the front seat emerged NYPD detectives Martinez and Hanson. They both reached their right hands for their guns as they ascended the very few steps to the door.

Jo raised her hand to knock, then hesitated. The standard "NYPD, open up," sounded too harsh when she applied it to Henry, yet declaring her presence in a casual hello was much too friendly for a criminal investigation.

Hanson answered her question for her by reaching over her shoulder and pounding the glass door's frame with his fist. He spoke authoritatively, but not in the more pugnacious manner the detectives would usually use to address a wily convict. "Doctor Morgan, this is the police. Open up."

They stood at the door, staring into the darkened shop. Nothing moved, no lights came on, nothing. Jo thought she heard a sound like rattling chains, but couldn't place where it had come from and attributed it to the bicycle rack she knew was across the street. She only knew because Henry had dropped his bike there on occasion when they went all over the city on an investigation.

"He's not coming, Hanson,"

"You wanna do the honors, then?" Hanson motioned to the glass door before them. He expected her to do the normal thing, that being to get the door down as quickly as possible, but instead, she pulled a bobby pin from her hair and began toying with it in the lock. He gave her a dubious look as she fiddled with the metal hairclip.

"Henry would kill me if I destroyed this door."

"Seriously?"

"Poor word choice, but yes."

Jo swung open the door and the detective duo stepped inside the shop. They called out for Henry and were only answered by their calls echoing off of the antiques. Reaching the back door of the shop, Hanson motioned Jo down to the lab, while he himself ascended the stair into the apartment.

Tightening her grip on the gun in her hand, Jo knelt down and carefully opened the hatch covering the laboratory stairs. She slowly began her descent, an apprehensive feeling enveloping her being. She could hear the chain's rattle more distinctly now, along with hushed whispers.

_He's just working on some macabre study of his, Jo_, she reasoned. She couldn't see much; it looked as if the only illumination in the room was coming from a candle of some sort. A very large candle.

The further she descended, the more her eyes grew used to the eerie lighting. She could now make out the form of a man standing between her and the light source, but nothing more than his silhouette.

"Henry?" she tentatively, cautiously asked.

The man turned toward her, his long coattails swishing back with the wind made by his movement. He smiled, a very thin, very long smile. His dark eyes narrowed as his smile grew.

"Detective Martinez, how lovely of you to join us."

The figure that Jo knew now was definitely not Henry reached back with his right arm as he extended his left and beckoned her forward. Her mind took a rapid assessment of everything in front of her

_He said 'us,' so Henry's here somewhere. He knows who I am. He's got a dark object in his right hand and he's trying to shove it against something behind him. Henry. Henry's behind him. There's something wrong with his finger on the hand he has out toward me. Dark, swollen… gangrene!_

"NYPD! Hands where I can see them!"

She stared right into his eyes. "Adam," for that's what she had ended up calling him for simplicity's sake as Henry had suggested in his questioning the week before, stared right back, his gaze never wavering as he leaned further back and applied the taser to Henry's body.

"I don't think so."

He held it longer, longer than he had anytime before. Longer than when he'd broken Henry's fragile resolve by telling him of how he'd made Abigail pose as the woman who raised him. Longer than when he'd just begun jabbing him with it for the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain, usually in connection with the name of someone Henry cared about.

Henry pushed himself against the chair, trying to direct the pain anywhere besides his vocal cords. His body was weakened, he couldn't stop himself from crying out.

"Drop your weapon _now_." Jo commanded. She raised her gun and pointed it at Adam. He pushed the taser onto Henry with even more force.

"Henry's got a little secret he'd like to let you in on, don't you, Henry?"

Adam turned to Henry, and in that split second, Jo found the courage to pull the trigger. The bullet blasted through his left leg, sending him to the ground in a crumpled heap of limbs. The taser dropped from his hand and skittered across the floor. Jo ran over and quickly cuffed Adam, then went to tend to Henry.

He didn't speak as she unchained him from the chair, nor did she. There was this hollow, vacant look in his eyes, and his limbs began to tremor. She gently brushed her hand down his arm, and her touch calmed his subconscious.

"You shouldn't have had to do that." he whispered, looking toward the man lying on the ground.

"I wish I didn't." Jo plaintively agreed. "But someone has to be your self-preservation instinct."

"That's not what I meant, Jo. I would have been alright; don't worry about me so much." He found himself reaching for her hand, holding it in his own, her fingers fitting surprisingly well between his own. He gave a reassuring squeeze, she reciprocated. "All of this, everything since my actions noontime last week, was for Abe and for you."

A sound on the stair broke the week's first peaceful moment, and Jo, Henry, and Adam looked up to see Hanson descending. His gun was drawn and he was slowly scanning the weapon back and forth. Only when he saw the scene before him did he lower the weapon, though he didn't pull his index finger from the trigger.

"It's clear, Hanson." Jo said, intimating with a flick of her eyes toward Adam that she wanted him to deal with the torturer. He begrudgingly went over to Adam and formally arrested him for assault and battery, while Jo dialed the precinct for an ambulance.

"Do you recognize him?" Henry asked as she tapped her phone screen to end the call.

"Who?"

Henry answered nonverbally, simply motioning with his head toward Hanson and the attacker.

"Oh. yeah. The John Doe streaker from civil. Said they call him the Freezer Flasher because that's where they always arrest him. Strange man, he seems."

"In more ways than the obvious." Henry commented. "Look closer, Detective."

Jo studied the man whom she had just shot, now better able to see his features because his dark fedora had been removed at some point. The face, the face was familiar. Her mind flashed back to a moment, a moment a week earlier when she had looked right into those same eyes, of a man begging for mercy, and she had turned her back because there was nothing she could do for him but seek out justice.

"That's impossible." she breathed.

She'd left that very man, the man being arrested before her, dying from a bullet to the heart on the corner of 38th and Park.


	17. Chapter 17

...one week later...

_Lucas snapped on the blue latex gloves and walked into the cooler to retrieve a table for the latest visitor to the morgue. He opened one of the available shelves and began to pull out the metal gurney, and was horrified when the body, that wasn't supposed to be on it in the first place, began thrashing about and leapt to the ground._

_The man was nude, which was about the only normal thing about the situation. He had no incision marks on his chest. He hobbled uncertainly on his right foot, his left being a black stump destroyed by gangrene. His dark eyes were at first wide with surprise, then narrowed with an almost controlling glare._

_Lucas backed himself against the wall in fear. The mysterious man advanced closer and closer, his hands outstretched as if to grasp his throat and slowly take away his lungs' access to air._

_Out of nowhere, Henry burst through the door and leapt on the man, pinning him down with his weight. He pulled a strip of gauze from the pocket of his lab coat and wrapped the man's hands tightly together behind his back._

_"Call Jo, Lucas. Now." Henry demanded as he struggled to keep the man on the ground. Lucas gladly left the cooler and dialed upstairs for the detective._

_"What are you doing in my morgue?" Henry now demanded of his captive._

_"Thought you'd get rid of me that easily, now, Henry? You may have won this round, but trust me, I'll find you again. Oh, I _will_ find you. And you will pay for all of this."_

{*.*.*.*}

"Henry."

Adam had somehow reached up from the restraints and was now shaking his shoulder. His voice had become oddly feminine, as well.

"Henry!"

The sharpness of the tone broke Henry from his thoughts. He was sitting in his office, no Adam in sight. Jo leaned across the desk and had a hand on his left shoulder.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, yes, perfectly fine." Henry quickly dismissed her, in the same way he wanted to dismiss the harrowing daydream.

"Good. You ready?"

"For what?" he asked, still trying to return his mind to reality. Jo intimated her gaze to the file in her hand in reply.

"Oh yes, the interviews for the Haverford case. How could I forget?" His tone thoroughly implied that he had indeed forgotten. Jo could sense the awkwardness but didn't know how to dispel it. She waited as Henry grabbed his coat and scarf, then the two walked out of the glass-walled office and through the morgue. As they walked out, Jo offered, "If you ever need to talk about it, I'm here."

In the week since Adam's capture, the world hadn't quite righted itself, but it was closer to the optimum 23.5 degree axial angle. After a night's stay in the hospital to make sure the electrocution hadn't harmed him (though if it had, he could solve the problem quite easily), Henry returned to as much normalcy as he could. There was something different about his status now, he'd lost the tracker and hadn't been given a replacement, and thought it simply a departmental oversight until he recieved a call from the Lieutenant restoring him to his position as chief ME, pending he stayed home for a couple days to recover from the ordeal.

He found out upon his return that Jo, along with some other witnesses, identified Adam as the man he had shot, and since no one had actually seen him die, Henry's charges were dropped immensely, from murder one to reckless use of a firearm. He now only had to attend a gun safety course and complete a few mornings worth of community service hours to regain full legal status.

Adam never gave a name for himself during his questioning, and Henry never offered the many choices he'd been told. It was, surprisingly, Abe who finally offered the immortal's latest moniker. Reade Dawson, an antique store owner from Pennsylvania. Abe had apologized profusely for ever trusting him and for giving him the key to the store, to the point where Henry was literally swimming in culinary creations.

Adam, or rather Reade, as he was referred to now, was still being held within the precinct. As far as Henry knew, he hadn't tried to escape, but Henry feared that when he did, he would reapper in the morgue's freezer, it being the closest sub-32 Fahrenheit environment. Hence the daydream, or the day-mare, rather.

Even with his stalker locked away, Henry couldn't find peace in the situation. There was no one save Abe who he could talk to about the whole situation, the entire truth. As much as he wanted to explain everything, he didn't have the strength to trust. Jo said she would be there to listen, but what after? Would she hear his story and never speak to him again?

He didn't want to live with the lies any longer, but he saw no way out of the tangled web he'd been forced to spin.

{*.*.*.*}

The sign declared that the maze of buildings ahead was called The Orchard, and it was unexpectedly vibrant. Henry had learned all too well over the years that any sort of medical facility usually didn't meet the standards of its serene, cheerful nomenclature. However, the nursing home's campus was beautifully landscaped. Flowers sprouted from the small gardens alongside each edifice, apples hung ripe from meduim-heigt trees, suggesting the orchard of The Orchard was no older than the facility itself.

Henry and Jo emerged from the car and went to one of the smaller buildings. The word PEAR was painted in calligraphy above the main entrance, and small images of the fruit danced around the doorframe.

Of course in this peace, this idyllic setting, a kind elderly woman had been murdered with her own silk scarf.

Jo led the way, into the lobby and to a receptionist's desk. Henry noted all of the bowls of pears sitting about, surprised to find that a few of the bowls' contents were not a plastic imitation. He stood behind Jo, posture impeccable, and watched the residents milling around as she secured a room for the interviews.

{*.*.*.*}

_"Are you going to talk with them?"_

_"Talk with who, Bea?"_

_"The police. They sent in detectives to ask about Rose."_

_"And what do you think I would have to offer them?"_

_"I don't know. I've just… I've heard what you talk about when you're alone."_

_"What does it matter if I talk to myself? I haven't anyone left to talk to."_

_"You have me."_

_"No one that understands me, Bea. No one that understands everything."_

_"You talk about that medical examiner like he would."_

_"Heavens, you hear me talk about him?"_

_"He's here with the detective, Abby."_

_"Yes."_

_"Yes what?"_

_"Yes, I'm going to go talk with the police."_

{*.*.*.*}

"We've got all five women who lived on her hall offering to talk with us, and a few others from throughout the building."

Jo passed Henry a sheet listing the residents that were willing to talk.

_Beatrice Hammel_

_Emma Rice_

_Lucille Edmunds_

"Of course, if anyone comes under suspicion, we'll bring them to the precinct."

_Jane Whittaker_

_Margaret O'Malley_

_Nora Davis_

"As much as no one could picture a little old lady as a killer, they're surprisingly adept at it."

_Agatha Walter_

_Lydia Dawson_

_Jea-_

"Excuse me a moment, detective."

Henry rose from the chair and quickly left the ballroom, Jo's calls for him mere echoes his eardrums chose not to hear.

Jo remained alone in the mock-up interview room, puzzling over Henry's abrupt exit. He hadn't been himself lately, but being stalked, shooting the stalker, then being arrested for murder, losing the body, finding the body alive and well and torturing you, being saved from the torturer you were trying to save others from, and being restored to pre-chaos normalcy gave him quite a good reason why. He shut others out anyhow, even before the tidal wave of the past two weeks. He shouldn't force himself to deal with this alone.

She picked up the roster of witnesses, looking to see if possibly one of them had been a trigger. There was no Abigail, so it wasn't a sudden memory of his lost love that had triggered his departure. She understood that pain; any time a case involved any man named Sean, Jo still had trouble keeping her focus on the work and not on her husband.

She'd heard a vague mention in passing about a Nora, though from Henry's tone in the comment it didn't seem he'd been all that fond of the woman, whoever she was. Probably not that, either.

Then she spied it. Dawson. The same last name as his stalker, Reade. And if she remembered correctly from the file…

Jo flipped through the visitor's log from the day of the murder that had been filed with the evidence. There, plain as day, a visitor to Lydia Dawson. Reade.

* * *

><p><em>ayenn: I have no idea how a murder charge would get downgraded or even if it could, nor do I know exactly what punishments go along with "reckless use of a firearm." I just needed Henry to get his job back for the story to continue as planned. Apologies for inconsistent-with-reality legal work.<em>


	18. Chapter 18

_The quiet was disturbing. More disturbing than the fire and the bombs he'd seen and heard all day. Noise meant progress, even if it was progress in destruction, it was progress nonetheless._

_Henry needed the noise to block out his thoughts. When he'd walked into the camps that afternoon, he'd been prepared for an impoverished, malnourished population to care for. When his eyes met the scene before him; of walking corpses, rampant disease, and the lingering smell of burnt flesh, he'd felt what no other member of the troops felt: empathy._

_He knew what it was like to starve, to slowly wither away under the careful watch of a cruel master bent on killing your soul and your spirit. He knew the horrors of being a human guinea pig, poked and prodded into submission. He even knew, though a short memory, the utter agony of flame slowly consuming his flesh._

_He'd been through the same hell as the people before his eyes, just not all at once and in such a short time. He could understand their pain, their fear, the nightmares he knew they would have in the years to come. and as much as facing his own demons made him want to turn away, it was this same motivation that led him on, through the gates of the concentration camp, to perhaps save a soul as broken as his own._

_Around him, other doctors and nurses swarmed the camp, gathering the emancipated prisoners and administering what care they could before transporting them to the nearby hospital. Henry joined with them, doing what he could to comfort and care for the thousands of people withering away in front of him._

_His memories tormented him for the entire day. The bile he found himself forcing back down his esophagus was not due to the conditions he saw in the present, but of memories from the past. How the sanitarium had realized his immortality and begun experiments on him "to study his condition." Experiments he saw echoed in the deplorable conditions of Nazi treatment of innocents._

_Even when he'd returned to the military camp, the memories would not leave him alone. He'd tried to sleep, but to no avail. So Henry found himself slowly and cautiously rising from his cot so as not to wake his comrades, and walking out into the starlit European night._

_Across the base at the hospital, the nurses were changing shifts. Abigail walked out of the building, formerly a school that the military had converted temporarily, and into the brisk night. She wrapped her military-issue jacket closer to herself, it being a men's cut it was quite loose on her feminine body. She was curious to see the silhouette of a man ahead of her, and a shadow cast across the rubbled ground. as she drew closer, she thought he looked familiar, but couldn't place who he was or how she might know him._

_Henry turned, hearing the sound of footsteps behind him. He saw a woman approaching him, wrapped tightly in her coat. It was the nurse he'd seen in the camp that day, the one who had brought to him the mysterious infant, the only one known so far to be found in any camp. A sparkle of recognition flickered in her own eyes, but she was still tentative in her approach to him._

_There was something. No other description in the English language could be found for it. A certain something that drew the doctor and the nurse, a man named Henry and a woman named Abigail, a man who would never see enough and a woman who had already seen too much, something drew them to each other. And neither knew it quite yet, but that something would remain, and grow, and strengthen. Beyond the mutual comfort of a sleepless night, beyond the lovely awkwardness of a first date, beyond revealing their deepest, darkest secrets, beyond a family and a promise and a love so unmistakably true. A something that would still be there, after everything else had been destroyed. A something that breached time and age and separation. A something always ablaze, but strengthened by simply turning the right corner at the right time._

{*.*.*.*}

He took the steps two at a time, never stopping to catch his breath, his excitement almost surpassing the need to breathe. He reached the top, the third floor, and thrust open the door, which opened to a wide lobby. It was like a large living room, roaring (electric) fireplace to the left, large cushioned chairs and couches, coffee tables with half-finished puzzles decorating their surfaces. The residents simultaneously looked up at him, but beyond a simple acknowledgement of his presence, didn't seem to worry or mind, and went back to their rounds of bridge or their conversations about life bygone.

Henry began slowly walking around the room, passing every table, every chair, looking for the cerulean eyes he'd only been able to see in his mind's eye for the last half-century. When he even got a minor glimpse of a blue tone to a woman's irises, he would stare, analyzing every last detail of her features before letting himself admit she was not Abigail. The last lady was particularly put off by his invasive staring and whacked him in the shin with her cane. Definitely not Abigail.

His efforts were beginning to feel as futile as they had felt after the months, the years of searching after her disappearance. Every time a flicker of hope appeared that she was still alive somewhere, he dropped everything to find her.

_Abigail and I, we played a little game. She could have you or her life. She chose to live, Henry. She betrayed you. She couldn't have really ever loved you, not if she chose her life over your love._

It was nonsense and he knew it. Adam had only said it that way to get under his skin. Nonetheless, doubt began to flicker in his mind. He pushed it away. It was nonsense.

{*.*.*.*}

_"I must be going now, Bea."_

_"I'm going to interview, too. We should go down together."_

_"No, you go first. I need to get something from my room. Besides, Rose was _your_ neighbor. You should talk to them first._

_"All right, Abby. I'll let you know if the medical examiner asks about you."_

_"If he does, say nothing."_

{*.*.*.*}

A door opened in the hall behind him. Henry turned his head around the corner to see two women leaving a room. One went to the elevators, the other began making her way down the hall as quickly as her aged physique would allow her. There was something about her, something about that spring in her stilted step, Henry couldn't help but smile.

He silently followed her, keeping some distance between them. He hoped that she would turn around, let him see her face and confirm his hope-driven suspicions.

All too quickly, she entered another room. Henry tentatively walked forward, closer and closer to the door, his heart beating faster and faster until he felt it might burst. It was a strange sensation, a complete upheaval of emotion he hadn't felt in years. Nervous, excited, breathless-Henry was utterly lovestruck.

It was her. It just _had_ to be.

Taking all of the chances in the world, Henry raised his right hand and knocked on the door.

"Just a moment," a voice called from inside. Hearing her, even with her tone crackled with a century of use, sent him beaming like crazy. His pulse quickened even more, though he thought if impossible to do so.

It felt like an eternity before the door opened. And Henry of all people was quite familiar with the length of eternity.

Her hair was curled just as it had been that morning, but time had frosted it to a snowy white. The faint lines that had slowly been forming now crossed her skin over and again. The scent of Chanel No. 5 meandered out from the room to him. Her eyes were just as blue, just as bright as the unpolluted skies he'd known as a child. And for the first time in fifty years, they were looking right into his own.

Henry couldn't find words. There were no words.

"Abigail." he breathed. His voice was too weak, he himself was too weak, to speak any louder, lest the tears he held back begin to fall. Neither knew who made the first move, but the long-separated husband and wife found themselves in the other's arms, holding on for dear

Abigail buried her face into his chest, silently crying tears of joy, which were quickly absorbed by his scarf. She reached her hand to his heart and carefully felt through the layers of fabric to the familiar scar, reassuring herself that this was not a dream or a figment of her imagination, but this was really, truly, Henry, her Henry, in her arms.

Henry brushed back a wayward strand of her hair, choking back the jovial tears of his own. "It's really me, Abigail, darling."

Abigail pulled back, brushing away another tear, her smile, that same elegant smile, filling her face.

"You don't look a day over two hundred," she laughed, still trying to control the tears at the same time.

"And you, my dear, have only grown more beautiful with time."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Doctor Morgan."

"Good. Because I never want to leave."

Henry leaned down to kiss her; in fact he would have kissed her were it not for Jo appearing at the end of the hall.

"Whatever you're about to do, Henry, don't," she commanded.

Henry stepped away from Abigail, all the while staring dubiously at the detective. She came forward and stood almost between the two.

"Ms. Dawson, I assume?" Jo nodded to Abigail. It took Abigail a minute to return to the present, to the world where life wasn't in any way what she had planned, a world where she'd used a false nomenclature for the majority of her life. She nodded her answer.

"Give me a minute with my errant ME, please." Jo nodded Abigail into her apartment. She acquiesced, though remained glued to the other side of the door out of curiosity.

"What do you think you're doing, Henry?" Jo demanded in a quiet but stern tone. Henry opened his mouth to explain, but Jo continued without letting him do so.

"Reade hurt you, he could've hurt me, we both agree that he is not a sane man, but that does not excuse taking it out on his grandmother!"

"Great aunt." Henry corrected. "And I was not avenging her... nephew's misdeeds," Henry shuddered at referring to Adam as Abigail's, and therefore his, nephew. "I was merely offering to help her downstairs to the interview. Ab-er, Lydia is the eldest witness on the roster."

Hopefully he'd caught that little slip-up in time. Perhaps he had, perhaps he hadn't. Either way, Jo knew he was lying.

"You _flew_ out of that interrogation room, Henry. You may be the most gentlemanly of gentlemen I know, but you were not rushing up here to help an elderly woman down the elevator. Now tell me: what were you doing in Lydia Dawson's room?"

* * *

><p><em>this was supposed to be the final chapter but alas my mind has a mind of its own... that was a plot twist even I hadn't seen coming, and I wrote the whole thing :P<em>


	19. Chapter 19

He was vulnerable. He'd already risked so much, surely if events were to come to a pinnacle such as this it would've been by Adam's choosing, not his own. Though in essence this situation was Adam's doing; were it not for his harebrained scheme to get Henry to join him he never would have kidnapped and reinvented Abigail in the first place.

Jo was too good a markswoman for him to fully dodge her bullet. Henry found he had no defense but the honest truth.

"I wasn't the only one Ad-er, Reade was threatening, Detective."

"I'm aware, Henry. You proved he was after me, too. What does this have to do with you being in Lydia Dawson's room?" Jo replied in a brusque, no-nonsense tone. Henry's cryptic replies had her on edge, even moreso after the past weeks.

As much as he wanted, he needed, to tell her the truth, Henry couldn't bring himself to fight off the part of his mind he'd trained into secrecy since his first night in Charing Cross.

"It's a long story."

"That's what you always say, and it's not an answer. I want the truth, Henry."

There was something in the way she said it, something about the expression on her face and reflecting in her eyes. Not necessarily that of vulnerability, but an openness, a striking humanness, almost an empathetic cast that reached through Henry's fortified emotions and at last broke down the walls he'd built to separate himself from the messy, emotional side of life.

Nevertheless, his reply was slow, his words chosen ever so carefully to mask the truth for as long as he could.

"Ms. Dawson isn't Reade's aunt. She's a pawn in his grand scheme. The same grand scheme where he threatened your life and Abraham's life to destroy me. She also is someone very special to me, and if you would be able to come over to my home after we finish up these interviews, I can tell you everything in much more clarity and detail.

"I know I am giving you just as cryptic an answer as you were trying to avoid, but trust me, we can't get into it here."

"You promise you'll explain after the interviews?"

Henry nodded, a solemn smile across his face, partially from realizing the gravity of what he promised to do, and partially in the esoteric humor he found in his reply.

"Cross my heart and hope to die."

{•*•*•*•}

"Explanation." Jo commanded. "Now."

Their last interviewee had literally just left the room, the door still swinging shut behind her.

"I... Jo, really, I cannot explain myself until we are back at mine and Abraham's apartment." Henry sighed with frustration.

"I know you despise my saying this, but it is a long and complicated story, and for me to tell you the complete and honest truth will take hours and hours, and you'll likely need some evidences I can only provide at home. Pictures and news articles and documents..."

Henry paused. He looked at her, his expression one of utter sincerity. As much as Jo wanted a straightforward answer, who was she kidding, this was Henry. Honest to a fault but in the least straightforward ways. Honest, but secretive at the same time. He was, she could see, letting her in in the only way he knew possible; for him there was no truth but the whole truth, and nothing but the truth would do.

"I need you to trust what I am doing until I can fully explain."

Jo nodded her acquiescence. The two then silently gathered their papers and left the interview space. While Jo was finishing the last of the paperwork at the front desk, Henry went about signing "Lydia" out of the complex for the evening.

When Jo had shuffled and signed the last of the official documents, she turned from the counter and was not all that surprised to see Henry standing next to a travel-ready Lydia Dawson.

She was about to say something snarky and sarcastic, but bit her tongue. "Trust him," she mutteredunder her breath, ushering the two out to the unmarked Chevy.

"There are two things I can tell you now that might clarify my earlier intentions a bit," Henry began as he closed the passenger door. Jo watched him expectantly, hand on the keys, not turning the car on until he did. Clarify, that is.

"One, Ms. Dawson is neither a Lydia nor a Dawson. Second, we are bringing her with us because... Because she is Abe's mother."

Jo gave him a puzzled look. "That makes Reade his nephew... Which makes you almost his cousin."

"You're correct in saying that the three of us, myself, Abraham, and Abigail are all related, but as for Reade, he only inserted himself into the dynamic a half-century ago."

Jo didn't know where to start on that one. First off, he'd told her about Abigail as if she were his wife, not a grandmotherly figure, assuming that by Abigail he meant the woman in the backseat. And how could Reade, a man in his thirties, do anything let alone rip apart a family two decades before his birth? And how on earth could Henry know all this, seeing as he was the same age?

Whilst Jo puzzled over the many loose ends of Henry's last answer, Henry struggled to find the words he was going to need in a very short time. He hadn't revealed the truth since, well, since he'd told Abe. Sixty-some more years didn't make it any easier; in fact it seemed the opposite was true. Then again, he had had ample time to prepare for telling Abe, he knew from the moment he and Abigail adopted the baby that he'd have to explain his perpetual youth to his son.

He hadn't let anyone get close. No one close to him meant no need to reveal the truth.

Jo pulled to the curb outside of the antique shop and Henry, ever the gentleman even when he was being the most arbitrary and perplexing soul on the planet, opened the doors for both women, Abigail/Lydia first. Jo was still utterly confused on what the woman's name was or who she was to the Morgans, so she thought in hyphenated terms.

Henry spoke quietly with Abigail/Lydia, then watched as she slowly entered the shop.

"Why are you sending her in alone?" Jo inquired as she sidled next to her partner.

"Abraham and his mother have been separated for almost fifty years. I think they deserve a few minutes alone together, if you don't mind my paradox." He mused, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. His focus was fully on the reunion inside, the sheer joy coming from both mother and son as they embraced. As much as he wanted to be there with them, it was their moment.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

She was gentle in the asking. Henry was being cautious and choosy about what he answered, and she didn't want to add anger at her for crossing an unknown line to his tumultuous emotions.

Henry sighed. "We'd just been visiting Abe at school. Berkeley, first semester of his sophomore year. I'd been uneasy about something the whole trip, something had just felt off, but I couldn't place it. He was so excited, finally taking some classes in his major-art history, he had a girlfriend, he was getting active in those now-infamous peace rallies... And Abigail and I were so excited for him. He was happy, and that was all we could ask for."

He said all this without taking his gaze from the shop's window. His eyes glazed over and the memories filled his vision. Jo, confused as she was, would not, could not, interrupt him for clarification. She let him tell the story, however strange and improbable it was sounding.

"We got back to the city and I was called out on an investigation. I was a medical examiner then, too. And at some point while I was looking over that body on the west side, she disappeared. No note, no calls, no explanation. I waited two weeks before I told Abe. It was another two months before we resigned ourselves to the fact that she was never coming back. But I never stopped looking. Never."

"Wait, Henry, so you're saying that Abigail was your _wife_?"

"Nothing I haven't told you before, Detective."

"Henry, she is _three times _your age!"

"Appeareances can be decieving." He offered mysteriously. He at last turned to her, offering his arm for her to take. "I believe they are ready for us now."


	20. Chapter 20

_When he told Nora, he'd been locked up in an asylum. When he told Abigail, she'd chased after him and promised to never lea__ve. When he told Abe, he was admired as some sort of hero. When he told Jo, well, he'd just have to wait and see..._

At the jingling of the door's bells, Abe didn't even look to see who was there.

"Store's closed."

"It is only I and Detective Martinez," Henry smiled, probably the most relaxed he'd been since he'd confronted Adam. Jo, on the other hand, stood stiff and afraid, awkwardly holding his arm while trying to stand as far away as possible. Her eyes flew about the room, landing on Abe, then Abigail, then Henry, then back again.

Abe examined Jo's wary survey of the people in the room. He then turned to his father, taking a step forward as he asked, "Henry, did you-"

"Not quite yet, but I am about to. If you would excuse us," Henry led the very hesitant Jo past Abigail and Abe, up to the apartment above. He offered her a seat on one of the antique pieces in the living room.

"Tell me what's going on, Henry." She demanded, a quiver in her voice from the confusion and apprehension brewing in her mind.

"In due time, in due time," Henry muttered as he quite noisily searched the kitchen for various herbs and two mugs in which to pour the homemade tea. He ground up the herbs , filled the tea infusers, then immersed them in the warm water filling the mugs. He brought out the tea and set it on the mahogany coffee table, and sat down next to Jo on the leather couch.

"I don't want your tea." She stated as he sat down.

"Passionflower. Less known but better suited for anxiety than chammomile. Trust me, Detective. You'll want the tea."

"What I _want_," she paused, taking a deep breath, "is an explanation."

Henry nodded. He picked up a photo frame sitting on the end table and gazed lovingly at the portrait before passing it off to Jo.

"This is Abigail."

Jo studied the photo, finding the uncanny resemblance of the young image with the elder woman still downstairs. She felt Henry set something else on her lap, and put aside the portrait of Abigail to see what it was. An album, monogrammed with two sets of initials. One Henry's, the other...

"And this is our wedding album."

She flipped the first page, and there, plain as day, was Henry. The man she was sitting next to was standing proudly beside his bride. He looked every bit the part of a 1940's groom, and Abigail, adorned in layers of ivory fabric, appeared just as she had in the portrait. At the couple's feet sat an infant, wearing a miniature tuxedo of his own.

Jo didn't let herself think. She simply absorbed. With each turn of the page, she saw more and more of young Abigail and modern Henry, walking the aisle, saying their vows, dancing together, a newlywed kiss. The infant also appeared frequently, in the arms of Henry or Abigail, and in a particularly adorable shot, his face and hands covered in wedding cake, him smiling up at Henry and Abigail, who were giving him wide-eyed grins of their own.

"And that," Henry smiled, pointing at the icing-covered infant, "is Abraham."

"How-"

"Look carefully at his arm." Henry interrupted. "Under the layer of buttercream frosting you can see a tattoo."

Henry traced his finger along baby Abe's arm, showing Jo the tattoo shared by the infant in the picture and the shopkeeper downstairs. She blinked, and blinked again, assuring herself that the still-unexplained tattoo was there.

"Abigail and I met in the smoldering embers of a Nazi concentration camp. She was a nurse, I was a doctor, both sent in for relief as the camps were liberated. We had no idea, Jo. It felt hopeless. Utterly hopeless.

"Then out of nowhere comes this nurse, carrying a perfectly healthy baby, and she brings him to me. And from that moment, I fell in love with the two most important people in the world; a woman named Abigail and an impossible survivor we named Abraham."

He watched her expression, tense for her reply.

"How... But... Henry, this doesn't make any sense." was her bewildered reply. She waited until he looked away, then quickly took a swig of the passionflower tea, hoping perhaps it would calm her haywire brain.

"You asked me once about the scar on my chest." Henry began. He reached up and slowly unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, exposing the not-so-fatal wound. "I told you I had been shot."

Jo nodded. It was all she could do; words were eluding here right now.

"April, 1814. We were poor... Who am I kidding, we were destitute. But somehow I had the luck to be offered a job as the onboard doctor of a trade ship called the _Regal_. We were carrying textiles here, to New York."

Seeing Jo's confused expression, he elaborated. "We were living in Wales at the time; me, my wife Nora, and our children, Henson, Sarah, and Jamey. I hadn't ever left the British Isles before that voyage."

"Anyhow, the captain had a slave, as many rich merchants did in those days. His name was Clive. Never did find out the captain's name, and I don't really care to know it.

"I had always been compassionate toward the enslaved, I would try to do what I could to make their lives better. So I befriended Clive; made it look to the captain as if I was teaching him some basic medical treatments, and we were never detected. About a week into the voyage, he came down with a cold. A particularly nasty cold, but nonetheless only the common cold. The captain had me examine him, but let me know beforehand he was looking for a particular, fatal diagnosis. When I defended Clive and the truth, that he would heal and was not infected with cholera... The first mate fired. The bullet hit square on my heart and all went black.

"I awoke in the ocean, choking on water, scared out of my wits. There on my chest was the wound, but no blood, no exit point in my back. I didn't know what to make of it. There was no explanation.

"I probably drowned three or so times that night before the second ship of the fleet reached me. They brought me here and back to Wales, where I went searching for my wife and children. The company had told them, accurately, that I had died at sea, and paid off my wages for the trip. They'd moved back to the outskirts of London, and that's where I found her, mourning at an empty grave."

At this point, Henry rose and went over to a tall and narrow crate in the corner of the room. He began rifling through it as he continued the story. He never could tell this part while looking someone in the eyes; even with Abigail he'd so feared the same betrayal that he'd spoken it to the wall.

"I tried to tell her what happened, and... Well... She had me committed. Charing Cross asylum. They did everything they could to restore my senses, and when they realized I was telling the truth, they began the experiments. It was only because of a particularly understaffed day due to an influenza epidemic that I finally escaped.

"I never got to see any of them again: my family, that is."

He gave a little cry of alacrity, pulling a large, flat object from the crate. He pulled the cover off and placed it on the table, careful to avoid the teacups on the close edge.

"We sat for a portrait a few years before the... Incident. It was passed down in the family as a curiosity, a picture of the family lunatic apparently is quite popular among my progeny. Abe somehow networked his way into purchasing it, so here it is."

Jo looked down at a very turn-of-the-century family. Turn of the nineteenth century, that is. The matriarch, for that seemed the most _apropos_ label, had her hair pulled sharply into a bun, a commandeering but nonetheless loving expression in her eyes. The children; there were three, framed their parents. The eldest son stood behind his mother, a hand on her shoulder, the daughter, with long dark-blond tresses cascading down her back, behind her father, and the youngest, a boy of about four, stood at their feet, leaning slightly into his mother's skirts. The father... The father was Henry. He had utterly ridiculous mutton chops, but behind the bad beard styling were the same knowing eyes and crooked smile of the man who had just placed the portrait in front of her.

"I am immortal, Jo. I can be killed, but I can never die. Every time I do, I return in water. Nude. I assume you discovered my file in civil affairs during the investigation. It shouldn't be a list of public indecency charges, it should be death records in the morgue. And the same goes for Adam."

Jo was still unable to speak. She was alone in a minefield that seemed to be perpetually fired upon, bombshell after bombshell exploding in her sight lines, the loud noise and bright light of truth exploding from her mysterious partner.

"I must call him Adam, for that is how he first introduced himself to me, as a fellow immortal, anyhow. He was the first mate of the _Regal_, the one who shot me to begin the whole eternal mess, and he's been lurking in the shadows of my life ever since. He admitted to killing Mary Kelly, the _real_ Mary Kelly, back in London. He once ran us off a highway, both injuring Abraham and exposing my secret to him in the process. He is the one that took Abigail away and turned her into Lydia. And Jo, he was the one who threatened to harm Abe again, to harm you. He is the man I shot. He is Reade. And no matter what you do, he will always be there."

{•*•*•*•}

He left. He left her alone, with only her thoughts, the pictures, and his story playing on repeat in her brain.

_People aren't immortal. That's... That's just in movies, in books, not in reality. Not someone you know, someone you trust, someone who risked his own life to protect you._

Wasn't that what he'd been doing all along? He'd shot Adam to protect her. He never mentioned the little notes and gifts to protect her. He let that vile man electrocute him...

He kept the truth from her to protect her from this whole mess.

She thought through things rationally, logically. She was a detective, after all. She wouldn't believe something until there was solid evidence, solid proof in front of her face. And Henry knew that. So he gave her the proof she needed.

The pictures spoke for themselves. The rich paints from a time when all art was high art. The detail worked into each person's likeness, the striking resemblance of children to father, it wasn't something one could falsify.

And the wedding album; she could clearly see the Abe and Abigail she knew in the present in those faces from the past. And in the midst of all of it was Henry, changing only to fit the style of the times.

The scar was real-she had brushed it gently with her fingertips in disbelief both times she had seen it in order to remind herself.

All of his quirks, his affinity for things obsolete and his abhorrence of modern technology, made complete sense. His strange methodologies, the way he could observe and read a person before hearing a word they said, his hunches and uncannily correct ideas, they fit perfectly.

Jo's eyes wandered again to that picture from the album of baby Abe covered in cake, Henry watching him with the admiration of a father.

"Looks like you've got yourself an immortal ME."

{•*•*•*•}

"You okay, Henry?"

"Yes, yes, perfectly fine," Henry offered sarcastically, quickly snapping into anxiety. "What do you _think_, Abraham‽ I just laid out my entire history and I have _no_ idea what she thinks of it!"

"She'll believe."

Abigail stared back at the father and son, a plaintive smile on her face. Henry took a step forward, held her hand in his own.

"I may not be immortal, but I know how to read a woman's emotions. She'll believe you, Henry. She already does. She just needed you to tell her what it was she was believing in."

"You... Abigail, darling, I-"

"It's alright, Henry. My time with you is over. It was beautiful and exhilarating and everything I could have ever asked for... But it's gone, Henry. I'm not twenty five anymore. Even if by some miracle we could make it work, I don't have much time left.

"Abby-"

"Shh. Just because your body fights time doesn't mean your mind has to. Remember all the good days, the happy times. Remember the days we'd laugh and the days we'd laugh so hard we cried. Remember love. Remember family. But don't dwell. Don't settle yourself in something you can't get back."

Abigail pulled him closer, her arms around him. His hands settled on her waist as naturally and perfectly as if it had only been yesterday they were dancing together in the museum's great ballroom.

And they kissed.

And it was beautiful.

And Jo had to remind herself that this woman was Henry's wife and their kissing was an acceptable thing.

She leaned against the doorframe. Watching. Waiting.

"I promise," he whispered as the kiss ended. "You may leave this earth, but Abby, darling, you'll never leave my heart."

They pulled apart, sad smiles upon both of their faces. This was the end, their end, their moment of closure. Henry knew she was alive, she was alright. And Abigail knew he'd be able to move on, to keep living, like there was no tomorrow.

Because eternity, my friends, is an endless today.

* * *

><p><em>This may be the end. I kind of like this as the end. Thoughts on if there should be more? I might have an epilogue up my sleeve, but I'm not sure about it. Let me know if there's any loose ends I need to tie up, anything you think needs clarified, stuff like that. I'll work it in to the maybe-epilogue, though I'm pretty goshdarned pleased with this.<em>

_ayenn: sorry if the reveal was rambly. I was kind of planning for my other story I've left on hiatus called Halfway Done, But Barely There. It's basically Henry's backstory as I see it, so that's the story he's telling Jo here. _

_thank you a thousand times all for reading!(: I would give you a scarf but that's hard to do over the Internet but I'll try_

:)£

_that looks kinda like an emoticon wearing a scarf, oi?_


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